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不对 题目写了in favor of, 所以是non-college vs college
以下转帖
If we want to WEAKEN an argument, we must first find the logical flaws - the missing information - between the premises and the conclusion.
Premises:
The difference in average annual income in favor of employees who have college degrees, compared with those who do not have such degrees, doubled between 1980 and 1990.
Conclusion:
Increased competition between employers for employees with college degrees drove up income for such employees.
Logical gap:
1. There is a mathematical disconnect here! Just because the DIFFERENCE between two income groups increased, that does not mean that the ACTUAL amounts both increased. What if in 1980, non-college-graduates made $50k on average and college graduates made $60k. Then in 1990, non-college-graduate incomes dropped to $40k. The DIFFERENCE would have increased, but one amount dropped and the other remained unchanged. In order to conclude that "increased difference between non-college-graduates & college graduates = higher income for college graduates," we'd need to know that non-college-graduate incomes did not go down.
2. We are also concluding (without justification) that the reason these incomes went up is competition between employers. The logical gap here is: we're ignoring any other possible explanation. Even if college graduate incomes went up, do we know WHY?
In order to WEAKEN this hypothesis, we need to attack one of these logical gaps.
A) During the 1980s a growing percentage of college graduates, unable to find jobs requiring a college degree, took unskilled jobs.
This undermines the notion that employers are generally competing for college graduates by paying them more and more. We can't necessarily assume that "unskilled" means "lower paying," so we can't draw conclusions about changed in actual income amounts. We know that the difference between income averages changed, but this gives us reason to think that the explanation is NOT that employers in general are wanting to pay college graduates more and more. |
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