The following appeared as part of an annual report sent to stockholders by Olympic Foods, a processor of frozen foods:
"Over time, the costs of processing go down because as organizations learn how to do things better, they become more efficient. In color film processing, for example, the cost of a 3-by-5-inch print fell from 50 cents for five-day service in 1970 to 20 cents for one day service in 1984. The same principle applies to the processing of food. And since Olympic Foods will soon celebrate its 25th birthday, we can expect that our long experience will enable us to minimize costs and thus maximize profits."
Discuss how well reasoned you find this argument. In your discussion be sure to analyze the line of reasoning and the use of evidence in the argument. For example, you may need to consider what questionable assumptions underlie the thinking and what alternative explanations or counterexamples might weaken the conclusion. You can also discuss what sort of evidence would strengthen or refute the argument, what changes in the argument would make it more logically sound, and what, if anything, would help you better evaluate its conclusion.
In this annual report, the author concludes that Olympic foods,a processor of frozen foods is expected to have minimized costs and maximized profits because of its 25 years of experience in the industry. The author drew the conclusion based on the example of color film processing industry , which had been able to drop the cost of 3-by-5-inch print from 50 cents for five-day services in 1970 to 20 cents for one-day services in 1984. However,in my opinion, I don't think the author's conclusion is convincing enough and the reasons are as following:
First of all, this argument commits a fallacy of oversimplification.The author just simply applies the principle from color film processing to food processing and he fails to analyze the situations in between the two different industries peer to peer.For example, the decreased cost of color film processing may be because of the improved technology of photo printing, which is not related to the food processing at all.
Second, the author commits a fallacy of false analogy. Those two industries are complete different from each other, the color film processing is more about the printing technology and film rolls while the food processing involves big processing machine, transportation and food storage. It's possible that color film processing can drop the cost very easily as the technology becomes more and more sophisticated and the rolls become cheaper and cheaper, but it's more complicated to forecast the cost and profit changes in food processing industry as there're too many expects related to the whole process.
Third,the author should provide more evidence to support this argument.For example, the author should focus more on analyzing advantages and disadvantages the Olympic foods itself, then use a reasonable measurement to forecast the company's performance in its 25th birthday.After all, no one can guarantee that a company will become better as time goes by if the operation and management of the company are not on the right track.
In summary, I don't agree with this argument,because the argument creates problems of oversimplification,false analogy and insufficient evidence.To make the argument more reasonable, the author should take more detailed analyse into account.
The evaluation report goes here:
https://www.testbig.com/comment/87044#comment-87044
-------------------------
Always put a space after punctuation marks.