The following appeared in a newspaper feature story.
"There is now evidence that the relaxed manner of living in small towns promotes better health and greater longevity than does the hectic pace of life in big cities. Businesses in the small town of Leeville report fewer days of sick leave taken by individual workers than do businesses in the nearby large city of Mason City. Furthermore, Leeville has only one physician for its one thousand residents, but in Mason City the proportion of physicians to residents is five times as high. And the average age of Leeville residents is significantly higher than that of Mason City residents. These findings suggest that people seeking longer and healthier lives should consider moving to small communities." - GRE Argument 117
This newspaper story concludes that living in a small town promotes health and longevity. The story's author bases this conclusion on a comparison between the small town of Leeville and nearby Mason City, a much larger town. However, careful scrutiny of the author's evidence reveals that it lends no credible support to the author's conclusion.
A threshold problem with the argument is that the author draws a general conclusion about the effect of a town's size on the health and longevity of its residents based only on characteristics of two towns. The author provides no evidence that these ...
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Attribute Value Ideal
Score: 5.5 out of 6
Category: Excellent Excellent
No. of Grammatical Errors: 0 2
No. of Spelling Errors: 0 2
No. of Sentences: 23 15
No. of Words: 530 350
No. of Characters: 2667 1500
No. of Different Words: 199 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.798 4.7
Average Word Length: 5.032 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.537 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 200 100
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 146 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 93 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 59 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 23.043 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 8.105 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.609 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.372 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.587 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.12 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 6 5