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 bicycle-related accidents 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, to reduce the number of serious injuries from bicycle accidents, the government should concentrate more on educating people about bicycle safety and less on encouraging or requiring bicyclists to wear helmets."
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 to a health newspaper, the number of bicyclist wearing a helmet increased from approximately 35 % to nearly 80%. However, although using helmet is believed to reduce the number of accidents, on the other hand, the number of bicyclists got accident, in fact, increased 200 percent. As a result, based on the health newspaper, the government should concentrate more on providing proper education pertaining to bicycling and safety to people instead of encouraging or requiring bicyclists to wear helmets. The author states that there are several facts that, however, we cannot dispute, but this argument also hinges on unstated assumptions that should be revealed beforehand in order to make the argument convincing, namely, the number of people bicycling 10 years ago compared to people do now, how long they usually do this activity, as well as the importance of education on reducing the accidents number.
First of all, based on the newspaper, the number of people bicycling increase up to nearly 80 percent from roughly 35 percent. At first, we need to know whether this newspaper publishes the nationwide study that is valid and how the study is conducted. Take, for instance, that the study only depend on the report from bicyclist who got accident, without knowing that there were more people actually getting accident, yet they never reported those accidents. If the validity of the study is bereft of critical foundations such as the dependence only on reporting from people, then the result might be fallacious that the number of people wearing helmet has been improved over ten years. Thus, the argument presented to encourage less on wearing helmet would be apocryphal.
Turning to the second point of the study, the study shows that the number of bicyclist getting accidents actually increase approximately 200 percent. In order to believe that wearing helmet would not be effective, we need to know how bad the impact of accident on people wearing helmet and people without no protection. If we could find that the effect on people without protection such as helmet, then the conclusion to focus more on education would not be cogent. In addition, there is also another possibility if the bicyclists actually do more activities and take longer hours in bicycling nowadays than 10 years ago. Further, we should also know whether the number of bicyclist increase on what proportion over 10 years. With this information in place, the argument stated would not be merely convincing, but robust.
Last but not least, the argument points out that rather than wearing helmet, the government should focus more on encouraging people to get proper education. In order for this argument to have weight, we need to know directly from the bicyclist and authorities such as police regarding the causes of their injuries. Did they get accident because they did not know the proper rule or safety road? If so, then the argument concluded on the health magazine would be warranted that people need education.
To put it in a nutshell, the argument presented on the article gives an interesting hypothesis regarding people wearing helmet during bicycling. However, there are some evidence we need to know before rashly concluding that wearing helmet is not effective and providing education instead would be effective, namely the data of number people bicycling 10 years ago and today, the reasons behind the accident, as well as the validity of the study conducted and published on that health newspaper.
Discourse Markers used:
['actually', 'also', 'but', 'first', 'however', 'if', 'regarding', 'second', 'so', 'then', 'thus', 'well', 'for instance', 'in addition', 'in fact', 'such as', 'as a result', 'as well as', 'first of all', 'on the other hand']
Attributes: Values AverageValues Percentages(Values/AverageValues)% => Comments
Performance in Part of Speech:
Nouns: 0.237421383648 0.25644967241 93% => OK
Verbs: 0.168238993711 0.15541462614 108% => OK
Adjectives: 0.0550314465409 0.0836205057962 66% => OK
Adverbs: 0.0786163522013 0.0520304965353 151% => OK
Pronouns: 0.0204402515723 0.0272364105082 75% => OK
Prepositions: 0.13679245283 0.125424944231 109% => OK
Participles: 0.0660377358491 0.0416121511921 159% => OK
Conjunctions: 2.68558660105 2.79052419416 96% => OK
Infinitives: 0.0314465408805 0.026700313972 118% => OK
Particles: 0.00314465408805 0.001811407834 174% => OK
Determiners: 0.0990566037736 0.113004496875 88% => OK
Modal_auxiliary: 0.0204402515723 0.0255425247493 80% => OK
WH_determiners: 0.0110062893082 0.0127820249294 86% => OK
Vocabulary words and sentences:
No of characters: 3515.0 2731.13054187 129% => OK
No of words: 573.0 446.07635468 128% => OK
Chars per words: 6.13438045375 6.12365571057 100% => OK
Fourth root words length: 4.89258810929 4.57801047555 107% => OK
words length more than 5 chars: 0.420593368237 0.378187486979 111% => OK
words length more than 6 chars: 0.287958115183 0.287650121315 100% => OK
words length more than 7 chars: 0.223385689354 0.208842608468 107% => OK
words length more than 8 chars: 0.153577661431 0.135150697306 114% => OK
Word Length SD: 2.68558660105 2.79052419416 96% => OK
Unique words: 245.0 207.018472906 118% => OK
Unique words percentage: 0.42757417103 0.469332199767 91% => More unique words wanted or less content wanted.
Word variations: 50.581283474 52.1807786196 97% => OK
How many sentences: 21.0 20.039408867 105% => OK
Sentence length: 27.2857142857 23.2022227129 118% => OK
Sentence length SD: 79.6214968865 57.7814097925 138% => OK
Chars per sentence: 167.380952381 141.986410481 118% => OK
Words per sentence: 27.2857142857 23.2022227129 118% => OK
Discourse Markers: 0.952380952381 0.724660767414 131% => OK
Paragraphs: 5.0 5.14285714286 97% => OK
Language errors: 0.0 3.58251231527 0% => OK
Readability: 56.081525804 51.9672348444 108% => OK
Elegance: 1.64705882353 1.8405768891 89% => OK
Coherence and Cohesion:
Essay topic to essay body coherence: 0.379060505739 0.441005458295 86% => OK
Sentence sentence coherence: 0.118484489579 0.135418324435 87% => OK
Sentence sentence coherence SD: 0.0729939348037 0.0829849096947 88% => OK
Sentence paragraph coherence: 0.569389370516 0.58762219726 97% => OK
Sentence paragraph coherence SD: 0.130715515225 0.147661913831 89% => OK
Sentence topic coherence: 0.169256839812 0.193483328276 87% => OK
Sentence topic coherence SD: 0.0795343346776 0.0970749176394 82% => OK
Paragraph paragraph coherence: 0.564400735493 0.42659136922 132% => OK
Paragraph paragraph coherence SD: 0.0582208131117 0.0774707102158 75% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence: 0.290513555301 0.312017818177 93% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence SD: 0.058456927165 0.0698173142475 84% => OK
Task Achievement:
Sentences with positive sentiment : 12.0 8.33743842365 144% => OK
Sentences with negative sentiment : 6.0 6.87684729064 87% => OK
Sentences with neutral sentiment: 3.0 4.82512315271 62% => OK
Positive topic words: 12.0 6.46551724138 186% => OK
Negative topic words: 6.0 5.36822660099 112% => OK
Neutral topic words: 3.0 2.82389162562 106% => OK
Total topic words: 21.0 14.657635468 143% => OK
What are sentences with positive/Negative/neutral sentiment?
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Rates: 83.33 out of 100
Scores by essay e-grader: 5.0 Out of 6 -- The score is based on the average performance of 20,000 argument essays. This e-grader is not smart enough to check on arguments.
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Note: This is not the final score. The e-grader does NOT examine the meaning of words and ideas. VIP users will receive further evaluations by advanced module of e-grader and human graders.