有生以来第一篇argument，挑了一个出现频率高的，昨晚写的模版，今天下午写了一下午，耗时很长，完全没有经验，感谢大家多帮忙提意见 Workers in the small town of Leeville take fewer sick days than workers in the large city of Masonton, 50 miles away. Moreover, relative to population size, the diagnosis of stress-related illness is proportionally much lower in Leeville than in Masonton. According to the Leeville Chamber of Commerce, these facts can be attributed to the health benefits of the relatively relaxed pace of life in Leeville.
Write a response in which you discuss one or more alternative explanations that could rival the proposed explanation and explain how your explanation(s) can plausibly account for the facts presented in the argument.
第一篇2小时，499字
In this argument, the arguer from the Leeville Chambeer of Commerce concludes that fewer sick days taken by workers and relatively lower proportion of stress-related illness in Leeville can be attributed to the relatively relaxed pace of life people live. Though plausible the assertion seems like, close scrutiny of the evidences listed above reveals that it is actually fraught with vague, oversimplified and unsubstantiated assumptions, and is therefore unpersuasive as it stands.
An underlying assumption upon which the conclusion relies is that besides the pace of life, there is no other significant difference between Leeville and Mansonton. Unfortunately, the article fails to verify the vital assumption. Perhaps Mansonton is located in a heavily polluted area with toxic gas released by the chemical plants nearby. Or perhaps the proportion of senior is significant larger in Mansonton than it is in Leville. As a result, it would be no wonder that people in Mansonton get sick easily, which makes the casual relationship between the relaxed live paths and health undoubtedly undermined.
Granted that it is indeed no other difference between the two places, however, there is still a considerable flaw emerged in the article that the statistic method applied on the comparison is questionable. Since Leville may be small in size, and the participants might constitute an insufficiently small sample to get real proportion of diagnose of stress-related illness. In light of those, the arguer surely cannot defend the above-mentioned conclusion without reasonable get rid of such problem by providing further evidence of the population of Leville and the analytical method used in the data of the comparison.
Even assuming that the comparison in the argument is proved to be reliable and scientific, however, the article is logically unconvinced in equating the amount of sick days with the degree of health. As a matter of fact, it is entirely possible that the fewer sick days taken by workers in Leville is only due to the workers' honesty that make them never lie for an extra absence like the people in the city do. What’s more, no evidence shows to weaken the possibly that some people in Leville have to be still at work in bad sickness to earn their bread for his family. If so, These possible facts render any conclusion based on the relationship between the amount of sick days and the degree of health unwarranted.
In sum, the argument is logically flawed in many aspects and therefore makes the conclusion farfetched as it stands. In order to enhance it and persuade me to believe the arguer's assertion, the arguer must provide clear evidence to show that main conditions of Leville and Mansonton are basically the same, and that the statistic method is scientific and reliable. Moreover, to better evaluate the conclusion, I would need more information about the working attitude of the workers in the two places. Only in this way can the argument be more valid, and be accepted by more people.
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发表于 2012-5-10 21:28:50
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