The following appeared in a memorandum written by the chairperson of the West Egg Town Council.
"Two years ago, consultants predicted that West Egg's landfill, which is used for garbage disposal, would be completely filled within five years. During the past two years, however, the town's residents have been recycling twice as much material as they did in previous years. Next month the amount of recycled material — which includes paper, plastic, and metal — should further increase, since charges for pickup of other household garbage will double. Furthermore, over 90 percent of the respondents to a recent survey said that they would do more recycling in the future. Because of our town's strong commitment to recycling, the available space in our landfill should last for considerably longer than predicted."
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.
In the memorandum, the writer concluded that the garbage disposal landfill would last longer than the extrapolation made by the consultants. The writer made this conclusion based on the following evidence: the greater amount of recycling by the residents, doubling the household garbage pickup charge will increase the rate of recycling and in a survey 90 percent of respondents committed to more recycling in the future. However, the argument of the writer is flawed because of three reasons.
First of all, the writer mentioned that the rate of recycling had doubled in the last two years and therefore he assumed that less garbage will be put in the landfill. However, it may be that while the rate of recycling had doubled, the amount of garbage tripled or even more. As a result, it might be that, for the last two years, the residents have been disposing of more garbage in the landfill than the prediction. If this is true, the writer’s argument will be weakened.
Secondly, the author extrapolated that the amount of recycled material would increase in the next month because there would be an increase in the charges for picking up other household garbage. But, the author did not present any evidence that can relate to why people would increase recycling. It might be that to earn money for paying the extra charge, people will engage in odd jobs, thereby reducing their time for recycling. The consequence is less amount of recycled products. Therefore, the writer needs more data to predict what will happen in the next month.
Finally, the writer presented the people who attended the survey as the representative of all the city residents. However, it might be inappropriate because the survey might be done among only a few residents and they might be the most educated and they know the value of recycling, and the rest of the people are not the same of them in terms of knowledge. Therefore, it is unwise to predict anything based on this survey.
In conclusion, it can be said that the writer’s argument, as it stands now, is flawed and based on some unwarranted assumptions. The author needs more data to remove these fallacies from his argument to make it stronger and more plausible
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| 2022-10-11 | TomLeeeeeeeeeeee | 69 | view |
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Comments
e-rater score report
Attribute Value Ideal
Final score: 4.0 out of 6
Category: Good Excellent
No. of Grammatical Errors: 2 2
No. of Spelling Errors: 2 2
No. of Sentences: 17 15
No. of Words: 376 350
No. of Characters: 1786 1500
No. of Different Words: 166 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.403 4.7
Average Word Length: 4.75 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.531 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 129 100
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 93 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 67 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 39 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 22.118 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 10.715 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.706 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.345 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.345 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.105 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 1 5
Transition Words or Phrases used:
but, finally, first, however, if, may, second, secondly, so, therefore, while, in conclusion, as a result, first of all
Attributes: Values AverageValues Percentages(Values/AverageValues)% => Comments
Performance on Part of Speech:
To be verbs : 17.0 19.6327345309 87% => OK
Auxiliary verbs: 17.0 12.9520958084 131% => OK
Conjunction : 8.0 11.1786427146 72% => OK
Relative clauses : 10.0 13.6137724551 73% => More relative clauses wanted.
Pronoun: 27.0 28.8173652695 94% => OK
Preposition: 44.0 55.5748502994 79% => OK
Nominalization: 9.0 16.3942115768 55% => More nominalizations (nouns with a suffix like: tion ment ence ance) wanted.
Performance on vocabulary words:
No of characters: 1839.0 2260.96107784 81% => OK
No of words: 376.0 441.139720559 85% => More content wanted.
Chars per words: 4.89095744681 5.12650576532 95% => OK
Fourth root words length: 4.40348946061 4.56307096286 97% => OK
Word Length SD: 2.66282646925 2.78398813304 96% => OK
Unique words: 179.0 204.123752495 88% => More unique words wanted.
Unique words percentage: 0.476063829787 0.468620217663 102% => OK
syllable_count: 570.6 705.55239521 81% => OK
avg_syllables_per_word: 1.5 1.59920159681 94% => OK
A sentence (or a clause, phrase) starts by:
Pronoun: 6.0 4.96107784431 121% => OK
Article: 13.0 8.76447105788 148% => OK
Subordination: 3.0 2.70958083832 111% => OK
Conjunction: 1.0 1.67365269461 60% => OK
Preposition: 2.0 4.22255489022 47% => More preposition wanted as sentence beginning.
Performance on sentences:
How many sentences: 17.0 19.7664670659 86% => OK
Sentence length: 22.0 22.8473053892 96% => OK
Sentence length SD: 61.3665598782 57.8364921388 106% => OK
Chars per sentence: 108.176470588 119.503703932 91% => OK
Words per sentence: 22.1176470588 23.324526521 95% => OK
Discourse Markers: 7.0 5.70786347227 123% => OK
Paragraphs: 5.0 5.15768463074 97% => OK
Language errors: 0.0 5.25449101796 0% => OK
Sentences with positive sentiment : 6.0 8.20758483034 73% => OK
Sentences with negative sentiment : 3.0 6.88822355289 44% => More negative sentences wanted.
Sentences with neutral sentiment: 8.0 4.67664670659 171% => OK
What are sentences with positive/Negative/neutral sentiment?
Coherence and Cohesion:
Essay topic to essay body coherence: 0.133904686301 0.218282227539 61% => OK
Sentence topic coherence: 0.0458345842499 0.0743258471296 62% => OK
Sentence topic coherence SD: 0.0461795771063 0.0701772020484 66% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence: 0.0737052159412 0.128457276422 57% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence SD: 0.0496600765728 0.0628817314937 79% => OK
Essay readability:
automated_readability_index: 12.7 14.3799401198 88% => Automated_readability_index is low.
flesch_reading_ease: 57.61 48.3550499002 119% => OK
smog_index: 3.1 7.1628742515 43% => Smog_index is low.
flesch_kincaid_grade: 10.7 12.197005988 88% => OK
coleman_liau_index: 11.08 12.5979740519 88% => OK
dale_chall_readability_score: 7.92 8.32208582834 95% => OK
difficult_words: 76.0 98.500998004 77% => More difficult words wanted.
linsear_write_formula: 13.0 12.3882235529 105% => OK
gunning_fog: 10.8 11.1389221557 97% => OK
text_standard: 11.0 11.9071856287 92% => OK
What are above readability scores?
---------------------
Rates: 66.67 out of 100
Scores by essay e-grader: 4.0 Out of 6
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Note: the e-grader does NOT examine the meaning of words and ideas. VIP users will receive further evaluations by advanced module of e-grader and human graders.