The following appeared in the opinion column of a financial magazine.
“On average, middle-aged consumers devote 39 percent of their retail expenditure to department store products and service, while for younger consumers the average is only 25 percent. Since the number of middle-aged people will increase dramatically within the next decade, department stores can expect retail sales to increase significantly during that period. Furthermore, to take advantage of the trend, these stores should begin to replace some of those products intended to attract the younger consumer with products intended to attract the middle-aged consumer.”
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 department stores can expect retail sales to rise dramatically within the next decade. This conclusion is based on the premises that middle-aged people will increase significantly during that period and they spend 39 percent of their retail expenditure to department store product and service, more than the younger consumer (25 percent). The conclusion of this argument relies on assumptions for which there is no clear evidence. Hence, this argument is very weak and has several flaws.
Firstly, the argument readily assumes that the middle-aged people consume more product and service in the department store than the younger-aged people. However, no evidence is stated in this argument to support this assumption. The argument ignores the absolute amount of middle-aged people. For instance, the number of middle-aged people bought in department store is 100 people while the number of younger people is 1000 people, so the expenditure of younger consumer is actually higher than that of middle-aged consumers.
Secondly, the argument claims that this store should replace products for younger consumer with products for middle-aged consumer. This is again a very weak and unsupported claim as this argument doesn’t demonstrate the correlation between the age and the product they buy. For example, middle-aged consumers usually buy product for younger, so if the department store just sells middle-aged products, it will not attract the middle-aged consumer.
Thirdly, the argument fails to consider the different circumstances between the past and the future. What happened in the past may not happen in the future. Therefore, if middle- aged people don’t want to devote their expenditure in department store product and service, the retails sales of the department store will not increase.
In conclusion, this argument is flawed for the above-mentioned reasons and is therefore unconvincing. To strengthen, the author should compare in term of absolute amount of expenditure middle-aged and younger consumers spend in department store. Moreover, the author needs to mention detail product they buy and should consider the difference between the past and the future. Without this information, the argument remains unsubstantiated and open to debate.
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Attribute Value Ideal
Final score: 4.5 out of 6
Category: Good Excellent
No. of Grammatical Errors: 0 2
No. of Spelling Errors: 0 2
No. of Sentences: 18 15
No. of Words: 353 350
No. of Characters: 1909 1500
No. of Different Words: 151 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.335 4.7
Average Word Length: 5.408 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.852 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 160 100
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 119 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 80 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 47 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 19.611 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 8.394 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.611 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.368 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.577 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.079 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 5 5