The following appeared in a health newsletter.
"A ten-year nationwide study of the effectiveness of wearing a helmet while bicycling indicates that ten years ago, approximately 35 percent of all bicyclists reported wearing helmets, whereas today that number is nearly 80 percent. Another study, however, suggests that during the same ten-year period, the number of accidents caused by bicycling has increased 200 percent. These results demonstrate that bicyclists feel safer because they are wearing helmets, and they take more risks as a result. Thus, there is clearly a call for the government to strive to reduce the number of serious injuries from bicycle accidents by launching an education program that concentrates on the factors other than helmet use that are necessary for bicycle safety."
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.
In this argument, the author suggests that the government pay more attention to educations about bicycle safety than encouraging bicyclists to wear helmets. This claim is based on statistics reflecting an increase of helmets wearing and bicycle-caused accidents, an assertion that wearing helmets causes more risks, and the conclusion that education program will be more effective than using helmets. Nonetheless, the argument contains several assumptions that seriously undermine the cogency of its conclusion.
As the author mentions, a increasing number of accidents caused by bicycling implies that bicycles tend to cause more accidents today than ten years ago. It is apparently premised that the quantity of bicycles is stable. Yet no one can deny the probability that the number of bicycles experienced a more distinct increase during the last decade. For instance, there are four times bicycles as much as it was ten years ago, in which case the proportion of bicycle-caused accidents decreases instead of increases. Therefore more statistics about the total number of bicycles is needed to illustrate the inference.
Even though the percentage of accidents caused by bicycling distinctly rises, the author can hardly conduct that the rise is definitely led by the illusive sense of security of wearing helmets. He obviously assumes there to be no other probable causes. Nonetheless, he fails to preclude the possibility that a large property of victims disregard the safety performance of bicycles or drink alcohol before cycling, which consequently causes severe injuries. Thus the author needs to provide more information regarding the authenticity and validity of the second survey and carefully discount other factors that might have lead to accidents.
Even if the use of helmets truly leads to more accidents, the author should not rush to the conclusion that education program is a better solution to the safety problem. He clearly approves the assumption that education on safety issues will contribute to the enhancement of security awareness and thereby reduce the occurrence of accidents. The truth might be, however, bicyclists have been too tired of taking lessons to concentrate on this program any more, which could seriously impair its effectiveness. Accordingly, the author should present more evidence about the reliability of education program so as to demonstrate its superiority to other solutions.
Conclusively, the author proposes that government attach importance to educations other than helmets use. While some unfounded assumptions contained impair the validity of his argument and requires more convincing demonstration.
Post date | Users | Rates | Link to Content |
---|---|---|---|
2023-07-24 | Technoblade | 58 | view |
2023-06-06 | kalp98403 | 16 | view |
2023-04-07 | poiuy23567 | 66 | view |
2023-03-09 | dxy40747 | 68 | view |
2023-02-11 | HSNDEK | 63 | view |
- Personal Statement for Biology PhD 60
- Critical judgment of work in any given field has little value unless it comes from someone who is an expert in that field. 58
- Colleges and universities should require their students to spend at least one semester studying in a foreign country. 85
- Woven baskets characterized by a particular distinctive pattern have previously been found only in the immediate vicinity of the prehistoric village of Palea and therefore were believed to have been made only by the Palean people Recently however archaeol 77
- The following appeared in a memo from the new vice president of Sartorian, a company that manufactures men's clothing."Five years ago, at a time when we had difficulties in obtaining reliable supplies of high quality wool fabric, we discontinued productio 90
argument 1 -- OK
argument 2 -- OK
argument 3 -- OK
Attribute Value Ideal
Score: 5.0 out of 6
Category: Very Good Excellent
No. of Grammatical Errors: 0 2
No. of Spelling Errors: 0 2
No. of Sentences: 18 15
No. of Words: 403 350
No. of Characters: 2218 1500
No. of Different Words: 210 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.48 4.7
Average Word Length: 5.504 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.934 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 182 100
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 144 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 112 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 79 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 22.389 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 7.312 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.556 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.33 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.568 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.1 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 5 5