argument求指点！ - ChaseDream

"It is time for the city of Grandview to stop funding the GrandviewSymphony Orchestra. It is true that the symphony struggled financially for manyyears, but last year private contributions to the symphony increased by 200percent and attendance at the symphony's concerts-in-the-park series doubled.In addition, the symphony has just announced an increase in ticket prices fornext year. For these reasons, we recommend that the city eliminate funding forthe Grandview Symphony Orchestra from next year's budget. We predict that thesymphony will flourish in the years to come even without funding from thecity."

Write a response in which you discuss what questions would need to beanswered in order to decide whether the recommendation is likely to have the predictedresult. Be sure to explain how the answers to these questions would help toevaluate the recommendation.

While it might be true that the Grandview Symphony Orchestra is on a niceup tick and the city should stop funding the symphony from next year, theauthor of the memo doesn't give a cogent inference to validate it. We caneasily tell that the symphony is experiencing a boost now, but this argument isrife with holes and weak assumptions. Readers may come up with severalquestions that can undermine or even topple the recommendation.

The author cites the evidence that donations and sponsors from privatesections improve by 200 percent last year, so the author wants to bridge itwith a sufficiency of funds for the symphony. What if the original funds fromprivate sections were pretty poor so that a double of it is still of no use?Furthermore, even if the private donations increased last year and the amountof it did make a big difference, we still have no reason to predict these privatecontributions will increase or even stay the same next year. It's much likelythat private contributions will go down because they think their previousdonations were quite useless. In this sense, if the government also stopfunding the symphony, it will be confronted a bankrupt dilemma. To strengthenhis/her argument, the author has to provide some more information that can helpwith eliminating these possibilities; otherwise, the inference in this memowill be recognized as ungrounded and unreasonable.

Almost by the same token, by mentioning the action that the symphony willraise the ticket prices next year, the author want to achieve an anticipationthat it will make more profits so it doesn't need sponsor from government anymore. This anticipation is quite ridiculous. How can the author talk aboutrevenues by mentioning only the prices without the quantity of sold tickets?Buyers may regard the increase of ticket prices as rip-off, as a consequence,they will buy less tickets and the revenue will even fall. The author has toreevaluate this issue and answer some possible questions and then hisrecommendation can be considered more and step a little bit further.

Last, the author of this memo doesn't consider other possibilities thatthe symphony will be confront with and simply predict that it will flourish inthe next few years even without funding from the city. This prediction will beoverturned if we think about other benefits when it receives funding from thecity. Will it cost a lot of money in public-relation activities without thefunding from government? It's quite probable that the symphony will spend abarrel of money in looking for some other sponsors, which may give rise to thesituation that it spend more than it earn. As a result, the counterproductiveresult leads to big financial deficit. Obviously, we'll never accept thissuggestion without excluding other explanations which will prevent the symphonyfrom losing profits.

A booming and promising symphony orchestra is no doubt needed in our city,and everyone what the city to save some money from funding it and invest itinto other more important things. But whether we should do this finance cut ornot needs more comprehensive consideration. The author has to provide moreinformation to answer no fewer than above questions. And only by doing this canwe take this recommendation into account and predicting a flourish future ofthe symphony under the new policy.