【Flyer杀G】小组-6.28作业 A 15, by Sean

柏拉图的世界UID: 2581296

TOPIC: ARGUMENT15 - The following appeared in a newsletter offering advice to investors.

"Over 80 percent of the respondents to a recent survey indicated a desire to reduce their intake of foods containing fats and cholesterol, and today low-fat products abound in many food stores. Since many of the food products currently marketed by Old Dairy Industries are high in fat and cholesterol, the company's sales are likely to diminish greatly and their profits will no doubt decrease. We therefore advise Old Dairy stockholders to sell their shares and other investors not to purchase stock in this company."
WORDS: 381
TIME: 00:30:00
DATE: 2010/6/29 23:49:47

Based on a recent survey indicated respondents are like to reduce their food containg fats and cholesterol, the author predicts a decrease of sales of Old Dairy (OD). Further, the author thinks the profits of OD will decrease with no double, thus he/she suggest stockholders sell of do not purchase stock in this company. But actually, his/he suggest would suffer from logical flaws, mainly due to inappropriate assumption.

In examining the recent survey, on which the author's implication and suggest rely on,
undependability of this survey would be found. Firstly, the author doesn't mention how many people participated in this survey, what are the details of contents in survey paper, and what are the consitution of the respondents, to name a few. Probably, this survey was conducted merely in a
school, in which only hundreds of children were surveyed. Since the number of these children is quite tiny compared with total costumers of OD, who are probably all around a city or states, the survey fails to demonstrate a wide enough tend as reducing food fraught with fats and cholesterol to influence the company's overall sales. Besides, even if the survey met its success to reveal a desire to reduce foods of fats and cholesterol, we should still be cautious with the word desire, since desire doesn't equal to actual behavior. People might be quite clear about the harm of redundance of fats and cholesterol and hold a desire the get away from the two, but they are more inclined to keep on eating them for tempation of deliciousness.

While we assume that a large number of people take actions to prevent foods of fats and cholesterol, diminishment of OD's sales seems not so ineluctable. Maybe the foods people resent are merely little part of OD's total sales, and decreasing sales of these foods will not lead to a diminishment of total sales of OD, because they can crunch efforts devoted to these foods and pay more money and human resource to other well-selling products. Moreover, even in the condition that the sales of this company decreased, their profits still have chance to keep static or even growing. To make this real, the company can change their marketing strategies, and to reduce the cost of raw materials or original products.

Finally, the author’s prediction that if the company fail in the market, such failure would extent to their stock market is dubious, too. As we know, reasons to influence one company’s performance in stock market are complex, even though marketing profits is a critical one. There is a chance that the company takes some actions to stir an increase of their stocks, such as to set up new subsidiaries, to introduce some promising products.

To sum up, the author’s a series reasoning from a survey to the suggestion to throw or not to buy the stocks of OD is undermined for its intrinsic insufficient details and fallacious assumptions. The stockholders had better not take imprudent actions before more dependable inspection and analysis of situation is conducted