The following appeared in an Avia Airlines departmental memorandum.
“On average, 9 out of 1000 passengers who traveled on Avia Airlines last year filled a complaint about our baggage-handling procedures. This means that although some 1 percent of our passenger was unhappy with those procedures, the overwhelming majority were quite satisfied with them; thus it would appear that a review of the procedures is not important to our goal of maintaining or increasing the number of Avia’s passengers.
Discuss how well reasoned you find this argument. In your discussion be sure to analyze the line of reasoning and the use of evidence in the argument. For example, you may need to consider what questionable assumptions underlie the thinking and what alternative explanations or counterexamples might weaken the conclusion. You can also discuss what sort of evidence would strengthen or refute the argument, what changes in the argument would make it more logically sound, and what, if anything, would help you better evaluate its conclusion.
In this argument, the author concludes that the review of Avia Airlines’s baggage-handling procedures is not important to the goal of maintaining or increasing their passengers. This conclusion is based on the premises that just about 1 percent of their passenger complaint about the procedures. The conclusion of this argument relies on assumptions for which there is no evidence, hence this argument is unconvincing and has several flaws.
Firstly, the argument claims that only 1 percent of the passengers were unhappy with their procedures and this number is a minority. However, the statistics cited in the argument may be misleading because the number of respondents is not specified. For example, the total passengers who did the survey from Avia Airlines are 1 million people, so 1 percent of this number is 10,000 people which are not a small number of people.
Secondly, the argument readily assumes that the majority of passengers were quite satisfied with this procedure. This is again a very weak and unsupported claim as the argument does not demonstrate any correlation between not complain and satisfy. To illustrate, 50% of passengers have not filed a complaint about their procedure and not satisfy with this baggage-handling procedures, so the review is still necessary to improve their services to get satisfaction from customers and increase their passengers.
Thirdly, the argument fails to consider the difference between the past and the future circumstances. The survey they made is presented as a result of past service, so if the request for baggage-handling procedures is more complicated in the future than in the past and Avia Airlines did not improve their procedures, the passengers who complain about their procedures may be increased, not just only 1 percent.
In conclusion, the argument is not convincing as it stands. To strengthen it, the author should illustrate the number of respondents, indicate more detail about their survey about how many percents is satisfy and consider the past and the future’s effect.
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argument 1 -- OK
argument 2 -- OK
argument 3 -- not exactly. need to argue:
thus it would appear that a review of the procedures is not important to our goal of maintaining or increasing the number of Avia’s passengers
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Attribute Value Ideal
Final score: 4.0 out of 6
Category: Satisfactory Excellent
No. of Grammatical Errors: 0 2
No. of Spelling Errors: 0 2
No. of Sentences: 13 15
No. of Words: 326 350
No. of Characters: 1691 1500
No. of Different Words: 144 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.249 4.7
Average Word Length: 5.187 4.6
Word Length SD: 3.001 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 126 100
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 101 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 78 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 53 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 25.077 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 10.88 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.692 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.384 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.645 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.052 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 5 5