17号就考试啦~希望NN们给点意见!谢过了先~“Advertising the reduced price of selected grocery items in the Daily Gazette will help you increase your sales. Consider the results of a study conducted last month. Thirty sale items from a store in downtown Marston were advertised in the Gazette for four days. Each time one or more of the 30 items was purchased, clerks asked whether the shopper had read the ad. Two-thirds of the 200 shoppers asked answered in the affirmative. Furthermore, more than half the customers who answered in the affirmative spent over $100 at the store.” Discuss how well reasoned... etc. Relying on a recent study, the author asserts that advertising the selected grocery items on sale in the Daily Gazette will help grocery stores to increase their sales, because data collected from a store in downtown demonstrates that during the advertising period, 2/3 of the 200 shoppers replied that they had read the ad and more than half the customers who replied to have read the ad spent more than $100 at the store. The asserting is misleading for three reasons.
First of all, by suggesting that the majority of the shoppers at the store answered the question of whether they had read the ad affirmatively, the author concludes that the advertisement did have an impact on the shoppers behavior. However, the author ignores the another important aspect of the problem. If among the people who did not shop at the store the proportion was also two-thirds, the study would only turn out to prove that the ad did not encourage the customers to shop at the store at all.
Second, the author implies that since more than half of the shoppers who replied to have read the ad spent over $100 at the store, the ad did increase the sales of the store. While the study does not provide any infomation about the sales of the store out of the advertising period, it is hard to determine whether $100 is higher or lower than the regular sales. Thus, the author's argument is questionable.
Even if the two proposition mentioned above are true, yet the author makes a gratuitous assumption that the store in downtown Marston can represent all the grocery stores in the Marston area. But stores in other parts of the area can differ in many ways from the downtown one. For example, the traffic system can be poor so that it is very unconvenient for people to go to the remote stores. Or the items in other stores are inferior in quality compared to those in the downtown store.
In the final analysis, the argument of the author is ill-founded. To strengthen it, the auther would have to cite extra data about the proportion of people who saw the ad but did not shop in the store and the sales of the store when it was not advertising in the Daily Gazette. Moreover, the author should also provide evidence to support that the store in the study can indeed be representative of all the other grocery stores in the Marston area. |