The following memorandum is from the business manager of Happy Pancake House restaurants."Recently, butter has been replaced by margarine in Happy Pancake House restaurants throughout the southwestern United States. This change, however, has had little im

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The following memorandum is from the business manager of Happy Pancake House restaurants.

"Recently, butter has been replaced by margarine in Happy Pancake House restaurants throughout the southwestern United States.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.

Although the argument provides a number of explanations to the results after replacing butter by margarine, these explanations, however, are not the only ones that could make sense of the situation.

The author drew the conclusion that "an average of 98 people out of 100 are happy with the change" from the fact that "about 2 percent of customers have complained". The transition from the complaint rate to the author's conclusion is dubious. The complaint rate only means that 2 percent of the customers complained are thus are unsatisfied about this change. It does not, however, give convincing indication about how the rest 98 percent of customers feel. Perhaps they are quite happy with the change as suggested by the author. Yet it could well turn out be the case, for example, that many of them are not pleased with the change but they just did not decide to complain. If that is the case, an alternative explanation for the complaint rate is that more than 2 percent of customers are unhappy with the change but only 2 percent made complaints.

Another argument in the article is that the reason why certain customers do not explain when they ask for butter but get margarine instead is that they either cannot distinguish the two or they use the term 'butter' for both products. This explanation seems thorough at first glance, but if we look more closely we can find other possibilities similar to the alternative explanation offered in the last paragraph. One such explanation would be that they know the difference between butter and margarine and do not use the same term for the two, and they may be dissatisfied when they get margarine for butter, but they just decide not to complain. These customers may have received similar treatments in other restaurants and made futile complaints and thus may think that such complaints will not do any good. Another possible explanation is that such costumers know the difference between the two products but they might not notice it at first. They just think that if they ask for butter, they get butter. When they finally realize what they have, they might figure that it is just a mistake made by the server and do not make much of it.

As discussed above, a number of plausible alternative explanations exist to account for the facts presented in the article. If the author wishes to strengthen his conclusion that this change has little impact on the customers, he needs to refute all the explanations mentioned above and other possible ways that can both make sense of the facts and indicate a significant influence of this change on the customers.

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Sentence: The complaint rate only means that 2 percent of the customers complained are thus are unsatisfied about this change.
Description: The fragment are thus are is rare
Suggestion: Possible agreement error: Replace thus with adjective

Attribute Value Ideal
Score: 5.0 out of 6
Category: Very Good Excellent
No. of Grammatical Errors: 1 2
No. of Spelling Errors: 0 2
No. of Sentences: 17 15
No. of Words: 447 350
No. of Characters: 2124 1500
No. of Different Words: 189 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.598 4.7
Average Word Length: 4.752 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.595 2.4
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No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 72 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 58 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 26.294 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 10.47 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.765 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.334 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.546 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.111 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 4 5