In surveys Mason City residents rank water sports (swimming, boating, and fishing) among their favorite recreational activities. The Mason River flowing through the city is rarely used for these pursuits, however, and the city park department devotes little of its budget to maintaining riverside recreational facilities. For years there have been complaints from residents about the quality of the river's water and the river's smell. In response, the state has recently announced plans to clean up Mason River. Use of the river for water sports is, therefore, sure to increase. The city government should for that reason devote more money in this year's budget to riverside recreational facilities.
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 of the statement advocates the devotion of more money of governmental budget to make recreational facilities on the Mason riverside. This conclusion is based on the premise that people of Mason City are notably interested in water sports and there should be facilities for them to meet their interests. The author reaches to the conclusion via making several unsupported assumptions.
First, the author has taken for granted that significant numbers of the citizens of Mason City would be interested in doing the water sports exclusively in the riverside. The number of people, their age and sex are not mentioned in the survey and this casts doubts on the survey to be reliable. Even if the survey is reliable, the people might meet their recreational desires in the pools of the Mason or other places and do not necessarily need to go to the riverside.
Secondly, the author assumes that with the river getting cleaned, we would see much more prompting the water sports in the riverside. There is no firm relation with the increase of water sports and cleanness of water. There may be many other factors that should be considered like the affordability of people to play such sports. It is possible that most of the people cannot afford to pay for doing such sports. It is also possible that the temperature of water is quite unfavorable during the year that makes it unjustifiable to invest on water sports which can be done only in few months. It is possible also that the depth of water disallows any further investment on the water sports as it is too shallow. All these possible scenarios can overshadow the author conclusion.
Finally, the author says that the government should devote budget for this year riverside facilities. There is no sign showing that the cleaning the riverside may not be a long term program. While the author assumes that cleaning the riverside would soon be done for the current year, it may carried out few more years. Then, there would be no need of running into the investment of water sport facilities as the cleaning project might take a long time. Furthermore, the author assumes that there is enough budget and then he wants government to pay for the recreational facilities. The Mason government might have other important priorities to be concerned with rather than recreational facilities to put its money for. A decent hospital, a decent school or university, the roads and so many other priorities might not allow the budget to be spent for the recreational facilities.
In short, the author creates the conclusion via taking for granted several unsupported assumptions. With each enumerated assumption being potentially unwarranted, the conclusion which is based on such a weak argument cannot be tenable.
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it may carried out few more years.
it may carry out few more years.
argument 1 -- not OK
argument 2 -- OK
argument 3 -- OK
Attribute Value Ideal
Score: 4.0 out of 6
Category: Very Good Excellent
No. of Grammatical Errors: 1 2
No. of Spelling Errors: 1 2
No. of Sentences: 22 15
No. of Words: 462 350
No. of Characters: 2264 1500
No. of Different Words: 197 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.636 4.7
Average Word Length: 4.9 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.691 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 154 100
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 105 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 79 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 63 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 21 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 6.135 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.591 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.324 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.536 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.139 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 5 5