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113. The following appeared in a memorandum written by the assistant manager of a store that sells gourmet food items from various countries.
“An interesting discovery was made last month at a local wine store: the store sold more French than Italian wine on days when recordings of French accordion music were played, but more Italian wine was sold on days when Italian songs were played. Therefore, I recommend that we put food specialties from one particular country on sale for a week at a time and play only music from that country while the sale is going on. By this means we will increase our profits in the same way that the wine store did, and we will be able to predict more precisely what items we should stock at any given time.”
According to the argument, the author recommends one store selling food to apply sales promotion strategy that succeeds at a local wine store. The assumption underlying the conclusion is that people will be influenced by the music and then buy more items related to the music. To buttress his conclusion, the author quotes statistics showing that in a wine store, sales of the wine of a specific country increased when music of that country was played. Moreover, the author assumes that owner of the food store can predict exactly what items to stock. The author's assertion, however, is heavily biased for a couple of reasons.
To begin with, the author illogically claims that the music caused the profit increase only because the two events happened coincidentally at the same time. The information provided in the argument, however, is insufficient to establish such a causal relationship.改为 The mere statistic correlation of music and sales, however, does not necessarily guarantee a causal relationship between the two events. Many other factors may contribute to the revenue rise. For example, people may choose wine from a particular country because the wine itself is popular during that period. Or perhaps other promotion tactics in the wine store is so successful that people was persuaded to buy the wine from a specific country. Any of the scenarios mentioned above, if true, will render the author's proposal unfounded.
Second, the author commits the fallacy of all things equal, applying one market strategy succeed in a wind store to an unrelated food store. The triumph in the wine store does not necessarily guarantee a same succeed in a food store because the two stores are not analogous. On the other hand, the divergences of the two stores apparently outweigh the similarities. It is possible that customers of wine store are more advance-educated, and they may be easily influenced by elegant foreign music. Or perhaps people love wine know more about music, and they can distinguish music from different country. Without ruling out these possibilities, the author reaches an absurd conclusion.
Last but not least, the author unfairly assumes that profit will surely increase immediately afthe the strategy implemented, and that the owner of this food store can predict more precisely what to stock. No evidence, however, is offered to substantiate the crucial conclusion. People may dislike the music, and the tactic may be counterproductive. Or people may change their preference every minute, thus making the prediction incorrect. Lacking information about the relationship of music and sales, we can hardly evaluate the author's unwarranted proposal.
To sum up, the argument is not as persuasive as it stands. To bolster his conclusion, the author has to provide more concrete evidence to demonstrate the background melody will heavily influence the customers and then stimulate the sales. Moreover, the argument is still dubious unless the author rules out all the mentioned possibilities undermining the reasoning.
提前三分半钟完成
字数不够 红色部分是后来凑上去的……
错别字多 possibilities concrete advance-educated scenarios
语法the author 后面要用第三人称单数，two event后面用复数。
拿不准的拼写 customer succeed successful 注意二者双写不同
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发表于 2005-5-28 12:24:00
发表于 2005-5-28 14:00:00
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