argument163 51互助组 by ruczephyr

ruczephyrUID: 2181202

题目：ARGUMENT163 - The following is taken from the editorial section of the local newspaper in Rockingham.

"In order to save a considerable amount of money, Rockingham's century-old town hall should be torn down and replaced by the larger and more energy-efficient building that some citizens have proposed. The old town hall is too small to comfortably accommodate the number of people who are employed by the town. In addition, it is very costly to heat the old hall in winter and cool it in summer. The new, larger building would be more energy efficient, costing less per square foot to heat and cool than the old hall. Furthermore, it would be possible to rent out some of the space in the new building, thereby generating income for the town of Rockingham."
字数：572          用时：00:30:00          日期：2007-7-8 16:29:39

The passage is presented to suggest the Rochingham's town council to tear down their town hall to not only reduce expense but also generate income for the town. To substantiate the point, the author provides evidences that the old town hall can not offer comfortable working environment for the officers , it is expensive to heat in winter and cool in summer, and renting some space for new building could make extra fund for the town. In-depth scrutiny upon these evidences reveals several fallacies the argument suffers.

In the first place, there is no sound evidence to validate that the unconfortable working environment is due to insufficient space rather than a result for over expansion of the town council. It is entirely possible that the space of the old town hall is sufficient enough for an average number of officers to comfortably work in it, however, there are many similar positions in the town council, which otherwise employ an extra amount of officers than the average number. Naturally, if the town council would dismiss some unskilled officers, this would not only solve the problem of insufficient working space, but also save considerable amount of budget. Thus, based on such suspicion, the argument is far from convincing.

What is more, the author unfairly asserts that the new hall will save much energy for heating and cooling. As he merely mentions that the new building will cost less per square foot, he also includes the larger space of the hall, and as a result the total expenditure to heat or cool would not indeed drop greatly. Moreover, the proper cost for heating and cooling of the old hall is not as much as the author imagined.  Therefore, without ruling out such adverse possibility, the author fails to persuade me to trust his suggestion.

In addition, whether renting out some space in the new hall would definitely bring benefit to the town is still open to doubt. Though, it might endow the town with extra income to run daily business, it does not exclude the possibility that renting out some space might serious decrease the working efficiency of the officers in the hall, who will be kept disturbing by the people who rent the space. And to offset the effect of such lower efficiency, the town council needs to allocate some of their budget. Probably ,the amount of income can not overcome the part of budget wasted by the renting activity, if this is the case I can not agree with the author's suggestion.

Last but not least, even grant all the aspects above, I still have enough reasons to doubt whether such project of building a new hall will indeed save much money for the town. Maybe the cost to build such a building is extremely high beyond the affordance of the town, and all the fund saved or gained from the author's suggestion could not amount to part of the expense of the new building.  And perhaps, it is costly to have daily maintenance, and as a result, such new building place another heavy burden on the financial plans for the town. Under this circumstance, it is too hasty for the author to claim that it is profitable to build another town hall.

In brief, the argument is made on the basis of several ungrounded evidences, to better improve the argument, the author needs to offer detailed information to verify all suspicions above.