A recent five-year study of the sleeping habits of a selection of people challenges the belief that receiving at least eight hours of sleep a night is healthy. People in this study who reported sleeping eight or more hours a night had a higher rate of specific health problems than the subjects who slept seven hours a night on average. People who reported sleeping five hours a night had only a minimal increase in health issues compared to those who slept eight hours a night. It is apparent that people should try to sleep seven hours each night; therefore, getting too much sleep is worse for one’s health than getting too little sleep.
Write a response in which you discuss the soundness of the conclusion. Discuss what questions would need to be addressed in order to decide whether the conclusion and the argument on which it is based are reasonable. Be sure to consider how the answers to the questions would help to evaluate the conclusion.
The premise of this argument challenges the long held belief that one should receive at least eight hours of sleep at night, putting forward a new theory that seven hours of sleep is optimum and it is more pernicious to get more sleep than less sleep. However, the link between the number of hours of sleep and health is a tenuous one and the logic put forward is specious.
Firstly, the argument is based on very little data. A five-year study is not a very long study. Most scientific studies of this sort are at least ten-year studies. In addition to this, how the sample group is selected is not mentioned. Ideally, the study should have randomly selected people, however, this is not mentioned in the passage. We do not have information about the group of people selected. Is the sample group representative of only one section of the population? Or does it include a variety of people? What was the selection criteria? This would affect the results.
Secondly, the passage is fairly vague about “specific health problems”. More information about the types of specific health problems and if it is the same set of problems that cropped up would make the conclusion more reliable. In addition to this, there are a number of factors that are not controlled for. Is it the same group of people who are made to sleep for seven hours and then eight hours and then five hours? Or are there different groups of people involved? If there are different groups of people involved, this would introduce more variability. There seems to be a number of variables that have not been standardised and controlled for, which impugns the conclusion.
Lastly, the link between health and sleep is a tenuous one. For example, some people may be predisposed to certain health issues and so the number of hours of sleep has no connection to their health. Furthermore, how do we know that it is more sleep that led to the health problems rather than the health problem that resulted in the person sleeping longer? There is not clear way to establish this in a cause-result relationship.
On the whole, while it may be true that sleeping for five hours is less deleterious than sleeping for eight hours, the model in this study is too simplistic and general. It extrapolates too much information, making the conclusion and the argument put forward unreliable.
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Comments
Essay evaluation report
Attribute Value Ideal
Final score: 3.5 out of 6
Category: Satisfactory Excellent
No. of Grammatical Errors: 0 2
No. of Spelling Errors: 0 2
No. of Sentences: 25 15
No. of Words: 405 350
No. of Characters: 1888 1500
No. of Different Words: 175 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.486 4.7
Average Word Length: 4.662 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.503 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 125 100
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 89 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 59 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 33 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 16.2 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 9.419 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.6 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.265 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.465 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.102 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 5 5
Transition Words or Phrases used:
first, firstly, furthermore, however, if, lastly, may, second, secondly, so, then, while, at least, for example, in addition, on the whole
Attributes: Values AverageValues Percentages(Values/AverageValues)% => Comments
Performance on Part of Speech:
To be verbs : 29.0 19.6327345309 148% => OK
Auxiliary verbs: 7.0 12.9520958084 54% => OK
Conjunction : 13.0 11.1786427146 116% => OK
Relative clauses : 11.0 13.6137724551 81% => OK
Pronoun: 28.0 28.8173652695 97% => OK
Preposition: 43.0 55.5748502994 77% => OK
Nominalization: 12.0 16.3942115768 73% => OK
Performance on vocabulary words:
No of characters: 1960.0 2260.96107784 87% => OK
No of words: 405.0 441.139720559 92% => More content wanted.
Chars per words: 4.83950617284 5.12650576532 94% => OK
Fourth root words length: 4.48604634366 4.56307096286 98% => OK
Word Length SD: 2.68879252511 2.78398813304 97% => OK
Unique words: 182.0 204.123752495 89% => More unique words wanted.
Unique words percentage: 0.449382716049 0.468620217663 96% => OK
syllable_count: 587.7 705.55239521 83% => OK
avg_syllables_per_word: 1.5 1.59920159681 94% => OK
A sentence (or a clause, phrase) starts by:
Pronoun: 5.0 4.96107784431 101% => OK
Article: 8.0 8.76447105788 91% => OK
Subordination: 2.0 2.70958083832 74% => OK
Conjunction: 2.0 1.67365269461 119% => OK
Preposition: 3.0 4.22255489022 71% => OK
Performance on sentences:
How many sentences: 25.0 19.7664670659 126% => OK
Sentence length: 16.0 22.8473053892 70% => The Avg. Sentence Length is relatively short.
Sentence length SD: 50.632258492 57.8364921388 88% => OK
Chars per sentence: 78.4 119.503703932 66% => OK
Words per sentence: 16.2 23.324526521 69% => OK
Discourse Markers: 5.52 5.70786347227 97% => 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 : 7.0 6.88822355289 102% => OK
Sentences with neutral sentiment: 12.0 4.67664670659 257% => Less facts, knowledge or examples wanted.
What are sentences with positive/Negative/neutral sentiment?
Coherence and Cohesion:
Essay topic to essay body coherence: 0.409793070412 0.218282227539 188% => OK
Sentence topic coherence: 0.0964400288327 0.0743258471296 130% => OK
Sentence topic coherence SD: 0.102473599465 0.0701772020484 146% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence: 0.227388751547 0.128457276422 177% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence SD: 0.0806859879788 0.0628817314937 128% => OK
Essay readability:
automated_readability_index: 9.5 14.3799401198 66% => Automated_readability_index is low.
flesch_reading_ease: 63.7 48.3550499002 132% => OK
smog_index: 3.1 7.1628742515 43% => Smog_index is low.
flesch_kincaid_grade: 8.4 12.197005988 69% => OK
coleman_liau_index: 10.5 12.5979740519 83% => OK
dale_chall_readability_score: 7.71 8.32208582834 93% => OK
difficult_words: 84.0 98.500998004 85% => OK
linsear_write_formula: 9.0 12.3882235529 73% => OK
gunning_fog: 8.4 11.1389221557 75% => OK
text_standard: 9.0 11.9071856287 76% => OK
What are above readability scores?
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Rates: 50.0 out of 100
Scores by essay e-grader: 3.0 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.