In an attempt to improve highway safety, Prunty County recently lowered its speed limit from 55 miles per hour to 45 on all major county roads. But the 55 mph limit should be restored, because this safety effort has failed. Most drivers are exceeding the new speed limit and the accident rate throughout Prunty County has decreased only slightly. If we want to improve the safety of our roads, we should instead undertake the same kind of road improvement project that Butler County completed five years ago: increasing lane widths and resurfacing rough roads. 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 if needed to evaluate the argument and explain how the evidence would weaken or strengthen the argument.
The author of the argument concludes that Prunty county should undertake a road improvement project like Butler county to improve it’s highway safety based on many premises like no reduction in number of accidents on highways of prunty county even after reducing official speed limit, reports from highway patrol and citing some statistics from butler county. Though, Prunty county should undertake highway safety projects, authors argument to persuade to undertake new project is rife with holes and has many assumptions and lacks a lot of supporting evidence.
Firstly, author asserts that, as efforts taken by prunty county have failed it should undertake new project for highway safety. While it may be true that measures taken by prunty county have failed, author's assertion is bold as it lacks supporting evidence. Author never provides the data of number of vehicles that used the highway of Prunty county. This data is vital for author to come to a cogent conclusion. It may be the case that, number of vehicles passing on Prunty county have increased than before due to some reason and thus number of accidents have also increased. However, ratio of number of accidents to number of vehicles passing may in fact has decreased. Hence, author needs to provide sufficient statistics to come to a conclusion that measures taken by Prunty county have failed.
Next premises on which author argues is based on report from highway patrol. Report states that ‘’many” drivers are still exceeding speed limits on the highway. But neither the report nor the author provide any numerical data and thus leave a space for lot of ambiguity. May be only 5 to 6 drivers have exceeded the speed limit and that too only by a narrow margin thus, not becoming the cause of accidents on the highways. Hence, detailed highway patrol reports mentioning number of drivers exceeding speed limit and by what margin are essential to regard Prunty county highway safety efforts as a failure.
Furthermore, author cities example and statistics of Butler county as a reason to answer, why project like butler county should also work for Prunty county. Author should provide lot of information about geographic and climatic conditions of both the prunty county and the butler county. May be climate of Butler county is mostly sunny and dry but that of Prounty county is mostly rough and rainy, then even if a project like that of Butler county is implemented at Prunty county, bad weather conditions render it useless and there is no reduction in number of road accidents. Hence, to project the example of Butler county as a reason for Prunty county to undertake new highway project is of no use if adequate analogies between Prunty county highways and Butler county highways are not highlighted.
Hence, in conclusion, the author of the argument should provide detailed statistics, clear definitions and perfect analogies to make his argument cogent and be more persuasive.
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argument 1 -- not OK
argument 2 -- not OK
argument 3 -- OK
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In GRE/GMAT, we have to accept all data or evidence are true. It is important to find out loopholes behind surveys or studies. Loopholes mean that we accept all surveys told are true, but there are some conditions applied, for example:
It works for time A (10 years ago), but it doesn't mean it works for time B (nowadays).
It works for location A (a city, community, nation), but it doesn't mean it works for location B (another city, community, nation).
It works for people A (a manager), but it doesn't mean it works for people B (a worker).
It works for event A (one event, project... ), but it doesn't mean it works for event B (another event, project...).
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Attribute Value Ideal
Score: 2.5 out of 6
Category: Poor Excellent
No. of Grammatical Errors: 0 2
No. of Spelling Errors: 0 2
No. of Sentences: 19 15
No. of Words: 486 350
No. of Characters: 2422 1500
No. of Different Words: 186 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.695 4.7
Average Word Length: 4.984 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.424 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 224 100
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 120 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 75 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 46 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 25.579 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 11.793 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.684 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.396 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.612 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.164 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 5 5