An ancient, traditional remedy for insomnia—the scent of lavender flowers—has now been proved effective. In a recent study, 30 volunteers with chronic insomnia slept each night for three weeks on lavender-scented pillows in a controlled room where their sleep was monitored electronically. During the first week, volunteers continued to take their usual sleeping medication. They slept soundly but wakened feeling tired. At the beginning of the second week, the volunteers discontinued their sleeping medication. During that week, they slept less soundly than the previous week and felt even more tired. During the third week, the volunteers slept longer and more soundly than in the previous two weeks. Therefore, the study proves that lavender cures insomnia within a short period of time.
Write a response in which you discuss what specific evidence is needed to evaluate the argument and explain how the evidence would weaken or strengthen the argument.
The argument talks about the ability of lavender flower's scent to cure insomnia which is a sleep disorder disease. A survey is conducted in order to prove the effect, where 30 volunteers suffering from chronic insomnia are made to sleep on lavender-scented pillow for three weeks. The argument seems logical but is deficient to conclude that lavender scent is a good remedy to cure insomnia that too in a short period of time.
According to the given excerpt, in the first week the volunteers continue their usual sleeping medication in addition to sleeping on the lavender-scented pillow. Now, this "usual medication need to be discussed in detail. What is the need of providing two treatments at the same time? The later benefit might be attributed to the usual medication more than the lavender therapy. Evidence specific to lavender therapy need to be shown in order to prove the remedial action of lavender's scent.
Next, it has been mentioned that in the second week, the volunteers slept less soundly despite sleeping on the lavender pillow and even more tired than the first week. Moreover, no information has been provided about the feeling of exhaustion during the third week. The argument needs to consider and notify the side-effects of lavender. It might be that in the third week , the volunteers felt even more exhausted which could be hazardous for the person seeking lavender treatment in the future.
Lastly, no data has been provided regarding the time taken by the usual medication to treat insomnia. A comparison between the two treatment times should be presented in order to infer that lavender cures insomnia within a period of time which is shorter than required by the usual medicine. It might be that the usual medicine cures insomnia in a four days which would be lesser than required by the lavender treatment.
Hence the above mentioned evidences need to be considered before concluding. A through research regarding all possible scenarios must be done in order to benefit the patients with the least side-effects possible.
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flaws:
You are on the wrong track. This is a topic for new GRE. read a sample:
http://www.testbig.com/gmatgre-argument-task-essays/ancient-traditional…
Attribute Value Ideal
Score: ? out of 6
Category: ? Excellent
No. of Grammatical Errors: 0 2
No. of Spelling Errors: 0 2
No. of Sentences: 17 15
No. of Words: 339 350
No. of Characters: 1686 1500
No. of Different Words: 159 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.291 4.7
Average Word Length: 4.973 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.688 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 115 100
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 95 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 79 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 38 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 19.941 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 6.795 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.471 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.351 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.602 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.08 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 5 5