argument 137 谢谢回帖！！！

lilisongsongUID: 2640091

TOPIC: ARGUMENT137 - The following appeared in an editorial in the Mason City newspaper.

"At present, Mason City residents seldom use the nearby Mason River for any kind of recreational activity, even though surveys of the region's residents consistently rank water sports (swimming, fishing, and boating) as a favorite form of recreation. Since there have been complaints about the quality of the water in the river, residents must be avoiding the river because they think that it is not clean enough. But that situation is about to change: the agency responsible for rivers in our region has announced plans to clean up Mason River. Therefore, recreational use of the river is likely to increase, so the Mason City council will need to increase its budget for improvements to the publicly owned lands along the Mason River."
WORDS: 510
TIME: 00:33:42
DATE: 2009-7-8 9:14:13

The argument is well-presented, but not thoroughly well-reasoned. By a consumption that the river could attract more people playing there, the argument for increasing its budget for improvement of the river seems logical. However, it contains several facets that are questionable, and each of them will be discussed in turn as below.

The first questionable facet in this argument is that the complaints about the quality of water does not indicate that residents are avoiding the river. The arguer gives us no evidence to support this. It is possible that, though the complains exsit, residents do not playin the river for some other reasons, such as the fact that the river is too deep and too dangerous to play, and that there's not too much sand on the side. For these reasons, people would not like it as well. Besides, there might be some other places better than the river. For example, there is a beach facing the sea near the city, so the citizens could go there easily to enjoy the water and sun. Since the author does not eliminate the alternatives, he can not convince me that the pollution is the reason for people not playing here.

Secondly, although the agency responsible for rivers has announced plans to clean up the river, the author provides no evidence to warrant the effect of the plan. If the river is a seriously poluted one, the agency could not clean up it thoroughly, leaving it improved a lot but not fit to be used of swimming and playing in the river. Also, as we know, the river might be very long and accrouse many cities. If the source of the polution is from the former part of the river, then only cleaning in this city is not enough. If so, the plan of the agency would not realize the author's thought to warrant the river could be clean enough to be used.

Even the river could be used for people and a lot of citizens would come, the increasing the council's budget for improvement to the lands along the river might be not necessary. The author provides no evidence that how much budget there is at present.Maybe it is a large amount so there is no need to use more. If so, increasing budget means a abuse of tax from citizens. What's more, other measures could be taken to settle this problem and collect more money to clean up the river, such as renting the field to merchant and allowing them to manage the land themselves, attracting other investment from persons and companies, and the likes. By these way, the government would save a lot of money, which could be used in other aspects.

Overall, the reasoning behind the increasing budget for improvement of the land along the river is not logical as it stands. Before any final decision, the author should substantial the assumption that people would like the river after it is cleaned. Also, the government could resort to many other sources for the improvement other than increasing budget.