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作文题目：
The following appeared in a health newsletter.
"A ten-year nationwide study of the effectiveness of wearing a helmet while bicycling indicates that ten years ago, approximately 35 percent of all bicyclists reported wearing helmets, whereas today that number is nearly 80 percent. Another study, however, suggests that during the same ten-year period, the number of bicycle-related accidents has increased 200 percent. These results demonstrate that bicyclists feel safer because they are wearing helmets, and they take more risks as a result. Thus, to reduce the number of serious injuries from bicycle accidents, the government should concentrate more on educating people about bicycle safety and less on encouraging or requiring bicyclists to wear helmets."
Write a response in which you examine the stated and/or unstated assumptions of the argument. Be sure to explain how the argument depends on these assumptions and what the implications are for the argument if the assumptions prove unwarranted.
正文：
In the newsletter, a suggestion is made that the government should concentrate less on requiring bicyclists to wear helmets and more on educating people about bicycle safety. Although it is of great importance to educate people about bicycle safety, it is also necessary to encourage people to wear helmets. The article, however, relies on the assumption that the increasing bicycle-related accidents are caused by wearing helmets. Obviously the hypothesis is not justified with some detailed information unavailable and other alternative explanations unconsidered. It leads to the implication of less encouragement of wearing helmets not completely proven yet.
The author's judgment is based on a ten-year national study which indicates that with the greatly rising behaviors of wearing helmets, the number of bicycle-related accidents has increased 200 percent. Nonetheless, the data presented in the article alone cannot justify the growing unsafety of riding bicycles. Lacking of the data concerning the accident rates and total number of bicyclists, we can’t deem the bicyclists' risk as increased. It is quite likely that the number of bicyclists has largely accelerate, thus the rate of accident has actually declined despite the increasing number of accidents. Therefore the conclusion of the study remains unjustified.
Besides, even if the rate of bicycle-related accidents did rise in the past ten years, there is no necessary association between the increasing accidents and the behaviors of wearing helmets. Accidents happening on the roads often result from many factors. This leaves open to the possibility that the bicycle-related accidents mentioned above are mostly caused by the improper behaviors of pedestrians or vehicle drivers. Plus, without sufficient evidence, we are not sure the effect of wearing helmets when bicycling. More researches about the bicycle-related accidents should be taken into account when examining the assumption mentioned above.
In addition, the assumption that bicyclists feel safer wearing helmets and take more risks is not demonstrated with enough evidence. We just cannot find any data in the study suggesting how bicyclists feel after they wear helmets. Common sense informs us that bicyclists who are willing to wear helmets are more possible to be careful about their own safety. Taking for granted that they will take more risks just makes no sense in this case. It is obvious that the author overlook other alternative explanations for the phenomenon in the article. Therefore the assumption makes little attribution to the conclusion.
All in all, the argument is logically defective in that the author put forward some assumptions which are not sufficiently proven warranted. The claim that wearing helmets should take on the responsibility of increasing accidents is also deficient. Although the suggestion that we should concentrate more on education about bicycle safety is truly right, yet without some crucial evidence it is just not advisable to stop encouraging bicyclists to wear helmets. |
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发表于 2012-8-14 14:50:27
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