"Recently, butter has been replaced by margarine in Happy Pancake House restaurants throughout the southwestern United States. This change, however, has had little impact on our customers. In fact, only about 2 percent of customers have complained, indicating that an average of 98 people out of 100 are happy with the change. Furthermore, many servers have reported that a number of customers who ask for butter do not complain when they are given margarine instead. Clearly, either these customers do not distinguish butter from margarine or they use the term 'butter' to refer to either butter or margarine."
Write a response in which you discuss one or more alternative explanations that could rival the proposed explanation and explain how your explanation(s) can plausibly account for the facts presented in the argument.
Based on three premises the argument concludes that customers of the Happy Pancake House restaurants either do not differentiate margarine from butter or they refer to either butter or margarine using the term butter. First of all, replacing butter by margarine in the southwestern HPH restaurants had little impact on their customers. Second, the HPH restaurants mention that ninety eight percent of their customers are happy with replacement of butter by margarine. And finally, many servers report a number of customers do not complained when they were given margarine instead of butter. None of these premises are satisfactory and there are several loopholes in the argument which makes any conclusion deduced from it untenable.
First premise of the author is that replacement of butter with margarine had little impact on southwestern HPH restaurant’s customers. The only information about customer’s reaction to this change is complaining of only two percent of customers and actually the author gives no information and statistics about number of the customers of the restaurant. It might be number of the customers who complain and abandon their restaurant high enough that loss of them would cause a significant financial loss for them. In addition, there might be other main reasons for not complaining about the replacement such as price discounts, higher quality foods, and etc.
Second notion of the argument is that ninety eight percent of customers are happy about change. The author fails to take into consideration that not complaining about a subject necessarily do not mean being satisfied about that and author should provide further convincing evidences for readers to support this claim. It is plausible that among the people who do not complain there are some who merely silent and do not voice their censorious opinions or simply avoid the restaurants. In addition, the two percent who had complained about the replacement might be agents of a larger group of customers.
The final subtle point which is mentioned in the passage is that a number of customers do not complain when they delivered margarine instead of butter based on the reports of many servers. The author should take into consideration that the both terms ‘a number of customers’ and ‘many servers’ do not give exact information to the readers since they are qualitative terms and vague. The argument should be primed by further information and statistics. It might be number of the servers are not adequate or representative of all the servers. If so, the argument would be weaken.
In final analysis, the author’s conclusion cannot be taken to be correct because, for the given information, it depend on number of premises all of which could be explained in other ways as well. The argument would have been more comprehensive if the author had presented sufficient yet convincing evidences to support his claim. Therefore, the argument is not totally convincing and unsound.
- 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 litt 54
- "Recently, butter has been replaced by margarine in Happy Pancake House restaurants throughout the southwestern United States. This change, however, has had little impact on our customers. In fact, only about 2 percent of customers have complained, indica 70
- "To reverse a decline in listener numbers, our owners have decided that WWAC must change from its current rock-music format. The decline has occurred despite population growth in our listening area, but that growth has resulted mainly from people moving h 66
Grammar and spelling errors:
Line 1, column 378, Rule ID: EN_COMPOUNDS
Message: This word is normally spelled with hyphen.
Suggestion: ninety-eight
...econd, the HPH restaurants mention that ninety eight percent of their customers are happy wi...
^^^^^^^^^^^^
Line 3, column 660, Rule ID: AND_ETC[1]
Message: Use simply 'etc.'.
Suggestion: etc.
... price discounts, higher quality foods, and etc. Second notion of the argument is tha...
^^^^^^^^
Line 5, column 39, Rule ID: EN_COMPOUNDS
Message: This word is normally spelled with hyphen.
Suggestion: ninety-eight
... Second notion of the argument is that ninety eight percent of customers are happy about ch...
^^^^^^^^^^^^
Line 7, column 404, Rule ID: ENGLISH_WORD_REPEAT_BEGINNING_RULE
Message: Three successive sentences begin with the same word. Reword the sentence or use a thesaurus to find a synonym.
...e they are qualitative terms and vague. The argument should be primed by further in...
^^^
Line 9, column 118, Rule ID: IT_VBZ[1]
Message: Did you mean 'depends'?
Suggestion: depends
... because, for the given information, it depend on number of premises all of which coul...
^^^^^^
Discourse Markers used:
['actually', 'but', 'finally', 'first', 'if', 'second', 'so', 'therefore', 'well', 'in addition', 'such as', 'first of all']
Attributes: Values AverageValues Percentages(Values/AverageValues)% => Comments
Performance in Part of Speech:
Nouns: 0.257462686567 0.25644967241 100% => OK
Verbs: 0.152985074627 0.15541462614 98% => OK
Adjectives: 0.0783582089552 0.0836205057962 94% => OK
Adverbs: 0.0522388059701 0.0520304965353 100% => OK
Pronouns: 0.0298507462687 0.0272364105082 110% => OK
Prepositions: 0.139925373134 0.125424944231 112% => OK
Participles: 0.0410447761194 0.0416121511921 99% => OK
Conjunctions: 2.99076266744 2.79052419416 107% => OK
Infinitives: 0.0130597014925 0.026700313972 49% => Some infinitives wanted.
Particles: 0.0 0.001811407834 0% => OK
Determiners: 0.0951492537313 0.113004496875 84% => OK
Modal_auxiliary: 0.0223880597015 0.0255425247493 88% => OK
WH_determiners: 0.0167910447761 0.0127820249294 131% => OK
Vocabulary words and sentences:
No of characters: 3013.0 2731.13054187 110% => OK
No of words: 478.0 446.07635468 107% => OK
Chars per words: 6.30334728033 6.12365571057 103% => OK
Fourth root words length: 4.67581127817 4.57801047555 102% => OK
words length more than 5 chars: 0.393305439331 0.378187486979 104% => OK
words length more than 6 chars: 0.28870292887 0.287650121315 100% => OK
words length more than 7 chars: 0.217573221757 0.208842608468 104% => OK
words length more than 8 chars: 0.171548117155 0.135150697306 127% => OK
Word Length SD: 2.99076266744 2.79052419416 107% => OK
Unique words: 205.0 207.018472906 99% => OK
Unique words percentage: 0.428870292887 0.469332199767 91% => More unique words wanted or less content wanted.
Word variations: 47.9798069007 52.1807786196 92% => OK
How many sentences: 21.0 20.039408867 105% => OK
Sentence length: 22.7619047619 23.2022227129 98% => OK
Sentence length SD: 53.2590043274 57.7814097925 92% => OK
Chars per sentence: 143.476190476 141.986410481 101% => OK
Words per sentence: 22.7619047619 23.2022227129 98% => OK
Discourse Markers: 0.571428571429 0.724660767414 79% => OK
Paragraphs: 5.0 5.14285714286 97% => OK
Language errors: 5.0 3.58251231527 140% => OK
Readability: 51.6321976489 51.9672348444 99% => OK
Elegance: 1.86507936508 1.8405768891 101% => OK
Coherence and Cohesion:
Essay topic to essay body coherence: 0.317910191814 0.441005458295 72% => OK
Sentence sentence coherence: 0.135642346956 0.135418324435 100% => OK
Sentence sentence coherence SD: 0.0778244322957 0.0829849096947 94% => OK
Sentence paragraph coherence: 0.557451983077 0.58762219726 95% => OK
Sentence paragraph coherence SD: 0.119861187667 0.147661913831 81% => OK
Sentence topic coherence: 0.138839050799 0.193483328276 72% => OK
Sentence topic coherence SD: 0.0948301134225 0.0970749176394 98% => OK
Paragraph paragraph coherence: 0.472335938055 0.42659136922 111% => OK
Paragraph paragraph coherence SD: 0.0271983898381 0.0774707102158 35% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence: 0.222912964232 0.312017818177 71% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence SD: 0.0717997439521 0.0698173142475 103% => OK
Task Achievement:
Sentences with positive sentiment : 9.0 8.33743842365 108% => OK
Sentences with negative sentiment : 9.0 6.87684729064 131% => OK
Sentences with neutral sentiment: 3.0 4.82512315271 62% => OK
Positive topic words: 8.0 6.46551724138 124% => OK
Negative topic words: 9.0 5.36822660099 168% => OK
Neutral topic words: 2.0 2.82389162562 71% => OK
Total topic words: 19.0 14.657635468 130% => OK
What are sentences with positive/Negative/neutral sentiment?
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Rates: 70.83 out of 100
Scores by essay e-grader: 4.25 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.