The following appeared in a letter to the editor of the Balmer Island Gazette.
"The population on Balmer Island doubles during the summer months. During the summer, then, the town council of Balmer Island should decrease the maximum number of moped rentals allowed at each of the island's six moped and bicycle rental companies from 50 per day to 30 per day. This will significantly reduce the number of summertime accidents involving mopeds and pedestrians. The neighboring island of Torseau actually saw a 50 percent reduction in moped accidents last year when Torseau's town council enforced similar limits on moped rentals. To help reduce moped accidents, therefore, we should also enforce these limitations during the summer months."
Write a response in which you examine the stated and/or unstated assumptions of the argument. Be sure to explain how the argument depends on these assumptions and what the implications are for the argument if the assumptions prove unwarranted.
The author based his assumption on the suggestion that the town council of Balmer should decrease the maximum number of moped and bicycle rentals from 50 per day to 30 per day as the population doubles. The author based his assumptions on several reasons which might sound reasonable. However he ignored some important facts that resulted in a weak argument and not convincing.
First, the author assumes that the increase in population during summer months is the main reason behind the increase in the number of summertime accidents involving mopeds and pedestrians. There is no evidence that the accidents are done by visitors alone. The accidents could be involving inhabitants of Balmer itself and has nothing to do with new visitors during the summer. The reason behind this assumption has a flaw because the author ignored to mention the evidence that the rate of accidents increases in summer only. The accidents could be more in any of the other season’s winter, spring or autumn; they do not have to be related to summer alone.
Secondly, there is no crucial evidence that the number of accidents is directly related to the increase in population. It could be due to carelessness of pedestrians, problems in the infrastructure of the streets which should be renovated. Also the number of accidents may be a cause of the rental companies them, they might have bought cheap mopeds and bicycle of low quality and that could be the main reason of accidents.
Finally, trying to benchmark the limitations done by the Torseau's town council is neither convincing nor reasonable, because there is no evidence that the reduction in number of accidents is directly related to the enforcing of the limitations of moped rentals. Ultimately the comparison could have been stronger if the data of the rate of accidents was gathered for the last five years to make sure that this year there is a decrease as one year is not a strong evidence.
To sum up, the author based his assumption that the increase in population during summer in the island of Balmer is the main reason to increase of moped accidents and that the limitation of moped rentals will be the solution to this problem same as the Island of Torseau. But the argument has several flaws that made it unconvincing. If the author based his argument on more reliable information, it could have stronger
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Sentence: Also the number of accidents may be a cause of the rental companies them, they might have bought cheap mopeds and bicycle of low quality and that could be the main reason of accidents.
Description: A noun, plural, common is not usually followed by a pronoun, personal, accusative
Suggestion: Refer to companies and them
flaws:
The first reason and the second reason are the same.
Attribute Value Ideal
Score: 4.0 out of 6
Category: Good Excellent
No. of Grammatical Errors: 1 2
No. of Spelling Errors: 0 2
No. of Sentences: 16 15
No. of Words: 400 350
No. of Characters: 1931 1500
No. of Different Words: 166 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.472 4.7
Average Word Length: 4.828 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.64 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 148 100
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 105 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 75 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 47 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 25 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 11.608 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.562 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.368 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.593 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.097 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 5 5