题目:The following appeared as part of an annual report sent to stockholders by Olympic Foods, a processor of frozenfoods:
“Over time, the costs of processing go down because as organizations learn how to do things better, they becomemore efficient. In color film processing, for example, the cost of a 3‐by‐5‐inch print fell from 50 cents for five‐dayservice in 1970 to 20 cents for one‐day service in 1984. The same principle applies to the processing of food.And since Olympic Foods will soon celebrate its 25th birthday, we can expect that our long experience will enableus to minimize costs and thus maximize profits.”
正文:
The argument thatlong experience will enable Olympic Foods to minimize cost and thus maximizeprofits omits several concerns that must be addressed to substantiate theargument. Long experience does not always yield lower cost and higher profit,and thus it does not support the main argument.
First, the authorassumes that long experience means better production efficiency. However,unlike established companies, some new companies, which depends less onheritage equipment, are more likely to utilize recent developed technology forbetter efficiency. Additionally, many factors other than production efficiencymay affect production cost. For instance, the raising price of food materialand electricity may increase the production cost. Finally, the author fails toargue that a better production efficiency would increase the profit. A weakmarket demand, for example, would lower the retail price and decrease theprofit margin.
To strengthen thereasoning, the author could use concrete evidences (e.g., production per workerper day) to prove the efficiency improvement over years, and could also excludethe factors which may affect market margin. These measures could make the argumentmore convincing.