The following appeared in a health newsletter."A ten-year nationwide study of the effectiveness of wearing a helmet while bicycling indicates that ten years ago, approximately 35 percent of all bicyclists reported wearing helmets, whereas today that numbe

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The following appeared in a health newsletter.

"A ten-year nationwide study of the effectiveness of wearing a helmet while bicycling indicates that ten years ago, approximately 35 percent of all bicyclists reported wearing helmets, whereas today that number is nearly 80 percent. Another study, however, suggests that during the same ten-year period, the number of accidents caused by bicycling has increased 200 percent. These results demonstrate that bicyclists feel safer because they are wearing helmets, and they take more risks as a result. Thus, there is clearly a call for the government to strive to reduce the number of serious injuries from bicycle accidents by launching an education program that concentrates on the factors other than helmet use that are necessary for bicycle safety."

Write a response in which you discuss what questions would need to be answered in order to decide whether the recommendation and the argument on which it is based are reasonable. Be sure to explain how the answers to these questions would help to evaluate the recommendation.

The author makes an argument for government to launch an education programme to reduce the number of serious injuries caused by the bicycle accidents by highlighting safety factors other than the helmets, based on the conclusion that helmet wearing has resulted in bicyclists feeling more safer and taking more risks. He supports his argument based on two studies which have been carried out in the ten-year period. However, a number of questions need to be answered before argument is evaluated to be sound.

Firstly, there is question whether the statistics that state that helmet wearing has increased from 35% to 80% is actually accurate. The argument only mentions that the numbers were reported by the users themselves and there is no independent objective evaluation of the data. It may be that the bicyclists were false reporting and infact bicyclists wearing helmets is much less than reported figure and even be zero. This undermines the claim made by the author that accidents occurred despite wearing helmets. Furthermore, there is no data on actual number of bicyclists. We did not even know whether the number increased or decreased.

Secondly, another study comes out with data that the number of accidents have increased by 200 percent. However, it is silent about numbers or resulting change in the vehicular traffic during the intervening years. It may be possible that 10-years ago there was no accidents among 10 bicyclists and presently there are 2 accidents among 1000 bicyclists. This increase may be accounted for by increased vehicular traffic. At the same time it does not give any data on whether people involved in these accidents infact wear helmets. Due to lack of the above evidence there is no reasonable way to conclude that accidents happened despite wearing helmets or that they took more risks or the environment itself became risky because of increased traffic. This makes the conclusion flawed.

Finally, there is the question of whether the 200 percent increase in accidents account for serious injuries or not. If these accidents only result in minor injuries then there is no need for additional government efforts for education programme for reducing the number of serious injuries. May be what is needed is a simple first aid kit or increasing awareness to encourage more people to wear helmets as they may have prevented serious injuries to bicyclists.

In conclusion, there is need for more information to ensure above questions are answered. Failure to answer the questions regarding the actual number of accidents, whether the accidents resulted in serious injuries or whether there was independent objective evaluation of reports by the bicyclists, would render the recommendation suspect and feeble.

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Comments

argument 1 -- not OK. 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...).

It works for A and B, but not C.

suggested:
maybe more accidents are due to other reasons.

argument 2 -- OK

argument 3 -- not exactly.

suggested:
Even if the use of helmets truly leads to more accidents, the author should not rush to the conclusion that education program is a better solution to the safety problem. He clearly approves the assumption that education on safety issues will contribute to the enhancement of security awareness and thereby reduce the occurrence of accidents.
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Attribute Value Ideal
Final score: 3.0 out of 6
Category: Satisfactory Excellent
No. of Grammatical Errors: 0 2
No. of Spelling Errors: 0 2
No. of Sentences: 21 15
No. of Words: 441 350
No. of Characters: 2271 1500
No. of Different Words: 201 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.583 4.7
Average Word Length: 5.15 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.678 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 185 100
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 147 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 100 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 66 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 21 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 10.305 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.619 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.312 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.508 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.074 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 5 5