The following appeared as part of an editorial in a weekly newsmagazine:
“Historically, most of this country’s engineers have come from our universities; recently,
however, our university-age population has begun to shrink, and decreasing enrollments
in our high schools clearly show that this drop in numbers will continue throughout the
remainder of the decade. Consequently, our nation will soon be facing a shortage of
trained engineers. If we are to remain economically competitive in the world marketplace,
then we must increase funding for education—and quickly.”
Discuss how well reasoned . . . etc
The argument that to keep competitiveness of country in global system, national government has to rise funding to education in order to increase number of trained engineers is not entirely logically convincing, because it ignores certain crucial assumptions.
Firstly, the argument assumes that decrease in number of enrollments to university will lead to shortage of engineers in near future. It is certainly possible that cause of this situation comes from drop in birth rate in most of the world. Parents prefer having one or two baby in comparing to big families of older generations. In most industrialized countries, as Japan or Germany face same problems. That’s why government needs to demand more children from their families in order to keep same level young population. For example, countries like China which has great resources of workers change its one child policy in some regions to replace ageing employees in country’s important industries or Turkey president demand at least 3 children from country’s new families to keep their position as youngest nation in the Europe.
Secondly, the argument never addresses impact of migrant workers. Author never mentioned migration of young and smart persons from less developing countries to seek economically better conditions. Brain drain is result of this process where in United States and Germany there are millions of intelligence employees whose graduated from their universities and stayed in there. If government provides better standards for migrants, shortage of engineers will be closed by migrants. For example, engineers from India where wages are too lower than an average, could easily move to Australia for working in better salaries.
Thirdly, the argument didn’t provide reasons of shortage of engineers. Technology changes our live really fast in the 21st century that most occupations disappear. Innovations in manufacturing and replacing simply workers by robots causes millions of job loses nowadays. Perhaps, manufacturers won’t need engineers a lot in future because computers could make their effort both with lower time and lower costs. For example, in the past NASA need hire tens of engineers to control its operations but now one guy are doing same job with help technology.
Finally, the argument omits desire of students. As mentioned in the previous paragraphs, given reasons affects students prefers other occupations in order to earn more money and job that will not disappear in the future. For example, air force hire fighter pilots for reconnaissance flight but now, drones are doing the same thing for less cost and risk.
Thus, the argument is not completely sound.
The evidence in support of conclusion, decrease in number of engineers doesn’t mean lose competitiveness in market because many countries face same problem and technology and innovation or migration is the best solution.
Ultimately, the argument might have been weakened by flaws and wrong assumption in the argument
| Post date | Users | Rates | Link to Content |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2018-12-20 | mehmoh | 63 | view |
| 2016-08-13 | Madridista | 83 | view |
- The following statement appeared in a consumer magazine:A fear of crime has led many homeowners to purchase monitored burglar alarm systems, but these people are wasting their money. The primary benefit of any burglar alarm system is one of deterrence, an 50
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- 58
Discourse Markers used:
['but', 'finally', 'first', 'firstly', 'if', 'really', 'second', 'secondly', 'so', 'third', 'thirdly', 'thus', 'as to', 'at least', 'for example']
Attributes: Values AverageValues Percentages(Values/AverageValues)% => Comments
Performance in Part of Speech:
Nouns: 0.322033898305 0.25644967241 126% => OK
Verbs: 0.120527306968 0.15541462614 78% => OK
Adjectives: 0.0941619585687 0.0836205057962 113% => OK
Adverbs: 0.0508474576271 0.0520304965353 98% => OK
Pronouns: 0.0169491525424 0.0272364105082 62% => OK
Prepositions: 0.148775894539 0.125424944231 119% => OK
Participles: 0.0282485875706 0.0416121511921 68% => OK
Conjunctions: 2.92593163088 2.79052419416 105% => OK
Infinitives: 0.0282485875706 0.026700313972 106% => OK
Particles: 0.0 0.001811407834 0% => OK
Determiners: 0.045197740113 0.113004496875 40% => Some determiners wanted.
Modal_auxiliary: 0.0112994350282 0.0255425247493 44% => OK
WH_determiners: 0.0112994350282 0.0127820249294 88% => OK
Vocabulary words and sentences:
No of characters: 3026.0 2731.13054187 111% => OK
No of words: 466.0 446.07635468 104% => OK
Chars per words: 6.49356223176 6.12365571057 106% => OK
Fourth root words length: 4.64618479453 4.57801047555 101% => OK
words length more than 5 chars: 0.424892703863 0.378187486979 112% => OK
words length more than 6 chars: 0.341201716738 0.287650121315 119% => OK
words length more than 7 chars: 0.263948497854 0.208842608468 126% => OK
words length more than 8 chars: 0.175965665236 0.135150697306 130% => OK
Word Length SD: 2.92593163088 2.79052419416 105% => OK
Unique words: 269.0 207.018472906 130% => OK
Unique words percentage: 0.577253218884 0.469332199767 123% => OK
Word variations: 71.732128733 52.1807786196 137% => OK
How many sentences: 23.0 20.039408867 115% => OK
Sentence length: 20.2608695652 23.2022227129 87% => OK
Sentence length SD: 64.8068819422 57.7814097925 112% => OK
Chars per sentence: 131.565217391 141.986410481 93% => OK
Words per sentence: 20.2608695652 23.2022227129 87% => OK
Discourse Markers: 0.652173913043 0.724660767414 90% => OK
Paragraphs: 8.0 5.14285714286 156% => OK
Language errors: 0.0 3.58251231527 0% => OK
Readability: 54.381041239 51.9672348444 105% => OK
Elegance: 2.65 1.8405768891 144% => OK
Coherence and Cohesion:
Essay topic to essay body coherence: 0.350877902249 0.441005458295 80% => OK
Sentence sentence coherence: 0.0856747440153 0.135418324435 63% => OK
Sentence sentence coherence SD: 0.0711587344049 0.0829849096947 86% => OK
Sentence paragraph coherence: 0.563270259162 0.58762219726 96% => OK
Sentence paragraph coherence SD: 0.223603840236 0.147661913831 151% => OK
Sentence topic coherence: 0.11960907912 0.193483328276 62% => OK
Sentence topic coherence SD: 0.0549755216156 0.0970749176394 57% => OK
Paragraph paragraph coherence: 0.253063881238 0.42659136922 59% => OK
Paragraph paragraph coherence SD: 0.105708079556 0.0774707102158 136% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence: 0.170714856744 0.312017818177 55% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence SD: 0.0771243517159 0.0698173142475 110% => OK
Task Achievement:
Sentences with positive sentiment : 10.0 8.33743842365 120% => OK
Sentences with negative sentiment : 12.0 6.87684729064 174% => OK
Sentences with neutral sentiment: 1.0 4.82512315271 21% => More neutral sentences wanted.
Positive topic words: 8.0 6.46551724138 124% => OK
Negative topic words: 8.0 5.36822660099 149% => OK
Neutral topic words: 1.0 2.82389162562 35% => OK
Total topic words: 17.0 14.657635468 116% => OK
What are sentences with positive/Negative/neutral sentiment?
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Rates: 83.33 out of 100
Scores by essay e-grader: 5.0 Out of 6 -- The score is based on the average performance of 20,000 argument essays. This e-grader is not smart enough to check on arguments.
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Note: This is not the final score. 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.