The following appeared in a memorandum from the planning department of an electric power company.
"Several recent surveys indicate that home owners are increasingly eager to conserve energy. At the same time, manufacturers are now marketing many home appliances, such as refrigerators and air conditioners, that are almost twice as energy efficient as those sold a decade ago. Also, new technologies for better home insulation and passive solar heating are readily available to reduce the energy needed for home heating. Therefore, the total demand for electricity in our area will not increase—and may decline slightly. Since our three electric generating plants in operation for the past twenty years have always met our needs, construction of new generating plants will not be necessary."
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.
According memorandum, which is from planning department, power consumption will decline at some unspecified location, based on certain anonymous sources. But result drawn are based on number of false assumptions.
Firstly, Memorandum does not specify source of survey, so that validity of data provided by it are skeptical. Moreover, number of home owners involved in this survey is also missing, which further difficult to understand, which class of society actually involved in this survey. If upper middle class is involved, then it may be the case that they can replace their home appliances with newer one. But lower middle class people may not eager to buy recent home appliances.
Secondly, planning department has mentioned manufacturer are involved in marketing for newer devices. But as per common business model, each company has to do some marketing for their better sale. Because of recent marketing campaign, it is not necessary that increase in sale will be drastically high than previous records. Moreover planning department has mentioned that newer devices are more (at least double) energy efficient than previously sold devices. But they haven't mentioned any concrete proof for this, so validity of same again in question.
Thirdly, weak cause and effect phenomenon has drawn by planning department that due to marketing of newer appliances people will prefer to buy it. But it may be case the that customer will prefer to buy such devices not to replace older one. In this case energy consumption will increase instead of declining. Also manufacturer can introduce some brand new appliances like food processor or shoe polish machine etc etc., here also energy consumption will be drastically higher. Additionally, they have mentioned energy consumption for last twenty years is constant. But it may be the case because of developing nature of that locality, population or industry may increase in future. So planning department has to consider this factor too before come up with result.
So in the end, planning department has to reconsider some factor on which they have suggested that additional energy power plant is unnecessary. And they should conduct location and class based survey to come up with more strong results.
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Attribute Value Ideal
Score: 4.0 out of 6
Category: Good Excellent
No. of Grammatical Errors: 0 2
No. of Spelling Errors: 0 2
No. of Sentences: 20 15
No. of Words: 358 350
No. of Characters: 1847 1500
No. of Different Words: 179 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.35 4.7
Average Word Length: 5.159 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.645 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 141 100
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 104 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 81 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 49 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 17.9 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 4.689 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.75 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.307 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.529 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.086 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 5 5