n an attempt to improve highway safety, Prunty County last year lowered its speed limit from 55 to 45 miles per hour on all county highways. But this effort has failed: the number of accidents has not decreased, and, based on reports by the highway patrol, many drivers are exceeding the speed limit. Prunty County should instead undertake the same kind of road improvement project that Butler County completed five years ago: increasing lane widths, resurfacing rough highways, and improving visibility at dangerous intersections. Today, major Butler County roads still have a 55 mph speed limit, yet there were 25 percent fewer reported accidents in Butler County this past year than there were five years ago.
Write a response in which you discuss what specific evidence is needed to evaluate the argument and explain how the evidence would weaken or strengthen the argument.
The author's argument that an improvement in general road conditions will bring down the accident rate in Prunty County as it has done in Butler County, may seem to be logical at the first glance.The author's conclusion could be correct if its premises were to be true. However, the author has made use of assumptions for which there is no supporting evidence, in arriving at his conclusion.
The author has assumed that by taking road improvement measures similar to those taken by Butler County five years ago, a significant decrease in accident rates can be achieved in Prunty County as well. He supports this assumption by stating that the accident rate in Butler County has come down by 25% in five years. First of all, he has assumed that the road conditions,traffic density and population in Prunty County and Butler County are comparable. The road condition in Butler County may have been much worse than the present road condition of Prunty County, before the improvement project was started in Butler County five years ago. The traffic density and traffic type of Butler County may also be very different than that of the Prunty County. The lanes in Prunty County may already be quite wide and streets may already be well-lit. If the author were to provide some evidence to draw an analogy between pre-road improvement project era, Butler County's road and traffic conditions and the current state of the same in Prunty County, this would certainly strengthen his argument.
The author has also assumed that the sole reason of decrease of accident rate in Butler County is the road improvement project which was completed five years ago. The author has failed to examine other factors which could have contributed to accidents. For example, drunken driving could have been the major cause of accidents in Butler County.However stricter drunken driving tests and heavy penalties for the same were put into effect few years ago and this resulted in decrease of drunken driving as well as accidents. The author is also silent regarding the traffic density of Butler County. The County's population may have decreased in recent years due to some reason like closing of some major employment providing industry,due to which the traffic density has also decreased in recent years. A decrease in traffic density will surely decrease the accident rates. Thus we see that the author has not provided any specific evidence to link the decrease in accident rate to road improvement in Butler County.
Summing up,the author may be correcting in assuming that an improvement in general road conditions will bring down the accident rate in Prunty County. After all, an improvement in road conditions will certainly not increase the accidents. However, as the author has not clearly defined the scope of the problem i.e the actual causes of majority of accidents,his suggestion that the accident rates will go down after road-improvement may not have the predicted results.
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Attribute Value Ideal
Score: 5.0 out of 9
Category: Very Good Excellent
No. of Grammatical Errors: 0 2
No. of Spelling Errors: 0 2
No. of Sentences: 19 15
No. of Words: 496 350
No. of Characters: 2439 1500
No. of Different Words: 188 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.719 4.7
Average Word Length: 4.917 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.497 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 195 100
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 134 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 83 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 45 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 26.105 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 10.94 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.842 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.426 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.571 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.206 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 4 5