. The following appeared in the editorial section of a West Cambria newspaper. “A recent review of the West Cambria volunteer ambulance service revealed a longer average response time to accidents than was reported by a commercial ambulance squad located

The argument claims that according to a review, commercial ambulance squad of East Cambria is better than volunteer service of West Cambria because the volunteer service taker longer time to report to accidents. Further, the argument also claims that for better care of victims and to raise revenue for the fees of ambulance, volunteer ambulance service of West Cambria should be disbanded and commercial service of East Cambria should be hired. The argument manipulates the facts and conveys a distorted view of the situation. The conclusion of the argument relies on assumptions for which there is no clear evidence. Hence, the argument is weak and has several flaws.

Primarily, the argument readily assumes that there should be shift from the volunteer service to commercial service only based upon the response time to accidents. This is a weak assumption as there is no relation between the response time to accidents and care of the patients. Though the time taken by the volunteer service is longer, but this might have many reasons behind this. One reason could be that the location of the volunteer service might be far away from the accidents sites, say at outskirts, due to which volunteer ambulance service takes a longer time. But one should never overlook the services because of long response time.

Moreover, the author failed to mention about the services of both, the West Cambria volunteer service and the East Cambria commercial service. The argument could have been considerably strengthened if the author had compared the services of both the places.

Secondarily, the argument states that in order to raise the revenue by collecting fees and to provide better care for patients, the volunteer service should be disbanded and the commercial service should be hired. Volunteer services work despite having any revenue, on the contrary commercial services work after collecting the fees. If due to unexpected circumstances, the commercial services did not receive any revenue, they would refuse to respond to any accidents. Therefore, disbanding volunteer services and hiring commercial services would result in poor service for the accident victims.

In conclusion, the argument is flawed due to the above mentioned reasons and is therefore unconvincing. Without convincing answers to the question, one is left with the impression that the claim is more of a wishful thinking rather than substantive evidence. Without much information, the argument remains unsubstantiated and open to debate.