Argument48 请拍

一月一号UID: 2148376

TOPIC: ARGUMENT48 - The following appeared in a newspaper article published in the country of Corpora.

"Twenty years ago, one half of all citizens in Corpora met the standards for adequate physical fitness as then defined by the national advisory board on physical fitness. Today, the board says that only one quarter of all citizens are adequately fit and suggests that spending too much time using computers may be the reason. But since overall fitness levels are highest in regions of Corpora where levels of computer ownership are also highest, it is clear that using computers has not made citizens less physically fit. Instead, as shown by this year's unusually low expenditures on fitness-related products and services, the recent decline in the economy is most likely the cause, and fitness levels will improve when the economy does."
WORDS: 431          TIME: 0:30:00          DATE: 2006-12-21

The argument above is not cogent as it stands. The author's conclusion is base on the assumption that the physical fitness of our citizens really declined, which is suspicious from the information above. Besides, the arguer take it granted that the highest level of fitness and the highest level of using computer happened at the same time would excuse of the fault of computer using.  Thus, the argument is vulnerable in several aspects.
First, the author fails to provide enough materials to demonstrate that the physical fitness of Corpora really declined. Though it is ostensible that the number of people who meet the standards of adequate physical fitness set by the national advisory board declined, it does not necessarily indicate that the fitness of our citizens declined. It is likely that the national board have raisen the standard of adequate physical fitness due to the increase of national wide improvement of people's fitness. As a result, the number of people who meet the new standard would decline though their fitness levels are not declining. Thus, if the author wants to convince us, he would provide the information that whether the standards have changed during the past 20 years.
Besides, even if the overall citizens' physical fitness declined as the author claims, we cannot exclude the possibility that the computer using is the culprit of it. The author make a fallacy that he thinks cause and effects would happen at the same time. In fact, if the computer using is the cause of physical fitness decline, the effects of it would reveal after a while. We can hardly expect that once people use computer more, their physical fitness would decline immediately. In addition, the check of people's fitness would be annual, thus it is likely that the result of highest fitness level was the condition of last year. If the author wants to exclude the cause of computer using, he should make more research on how the computer using affects people's health.
Furthermore, the conclusion that the decline in economy cause the decline of fitness level is too haste and too general. As the author provides the expenditures on fitness-related products and services are low only this year, we cannot conclude that this is the cause of fitness decline since the fitness level may have declined in the past few years. Besides, it is possible that people are more willing to do exercise themselves and they already have enough fitness-related products. Thus, the decline of sales of this kind of products may not caused by the decline in the economy.
In sum, the argument is not persuasive for several fallacies it commits, like not enough evidence, false causal relationship.