The following appeared in a letter to the editor of the Balmer Island Gazette.
"On Balmer Island, where mopeds serve as a popular form of transportation, the population increases to 100,000 during the summer months. To reduce the number of accidents involving mopeds and pedestrians, the town council of Balmer Island should limit the number of mopeds rented by the island's moped rental companies from 50 per day to 25 per day during the summer season. By limiting the number of rentals, the town council will attain the 50 percent annual reduction in moped accidents that was achieved last year on the neighboring island of Seaville, when Seaville's town council enforced similar limits on moped rentals."
Write a response in which you discuss what questions would need to be answered in order to decide whether the recommendation is likely to have the predicted result. Be sure to explain how the answers to these questions would help to evaluate the recommendation.
The author argues that, in order to reduce the number of accidents involving mopeds during the summer season, the moped rental companies should be restricted to moped rental per day. To support his/her argument, the author cites the following evidences: first, increasing population are likely to cause serve accidents involving mopeds and pedestrians; second, limiting the number of rentals, the moped accidents can be reduced; third, this policy is effective when implemented in Torseau. Tough the proposal has its merit, due to lack of relevant evidences and unaddressed assumptions, the argument remains unsubstantiated and flawed.
To begin with, the author unfairly suggests that rented moped is the only cause of the accidents. If the accidents were mainly due to the increasing number of mopeds on the street, the proposed policy for reducing the number of mopeds might be helpful. Nonetheless, many other causes remain untested. What if the accidents were mainly due to mopeds owners? It makes no sense to restrict the supply for rentals. Or perhaps, certain areas in Balmer were just too crowded to ride mopeds safely and banning mopeds in such area would be a much better solution than restricting the rentals. Without informing the proportion of rented mopeds and excluding all other possibilities, the conclusion drawn by the author is fallacious.
Moreover, the author assumes that the accidents can be declined after executing this policy. If mopeds are really fun to ride, maybe people who could not rent the mopeds will buy one, a scenario the policy could not prevent, either. Some pedestrians might become more reckless when they presume this policy would restrict moped largely, so instead reverting the initial goal. In other word, there might be more accidents because of citizens' inattention. We are only provided the population of Balmer Island during the summer months. How about the population during other months in the year? Perhaps the majority of tourists visit Balmer temporarily, and no more immigrants pouring into Balmer, then there is no need to restrict the rental of mopeds. We, thus, are unable to predict the future conditions after implementing the policy, because there are too many inconstant factoring involved in this issue.
The last issue we need to address is the extent to which the success of the policy in Seaville could be replicated in Balmer. To consider this issue, we have to answer the following questions. Did the policy reduce the accidents in Seavelle? Or could other factors such as the number of tourists or weather be responsible for the improvement? Balmer should only consider adopting the policy if it really helped reduce the accidents in Seavelle. Another question is this: did Balmer have the characteristics similar to Seavelle that were important for the proposed policy to work? For example, suppose Seavelle had an effective and competent management team to carry out the policy. Would Balmer be able to implement the policy in an equally effective way with its local officials? Balmer has to be similar enough to Seavelle in various aspects in order for the policy to work.
Overall speaking, imitating the policy adopted in Seavelle to reduce the number of accidents involving Moped may or may not be a good idea depending on the answers to a host of questions that have been explored above. Unless these questions are answered with more solid evidence, the issue remains unresolved.
Comments
Essay evaluation report
Attribute Value Ideal
Final score: 5.0 out of 6
Category: Very Good Excellent
No. of Grammatical Errors: 0 2
No. of Spelling Errors: 0 2
No. of Sentences: 24 15
No. of Words: 577 350
No. of Characters: 2895 1500
No. of Different Words: 264 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.901 4.7
Average Word Length: 5.017 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.537 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 236 100
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 146 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 106 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 66 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 24.042 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 16.453 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.5 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.295 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.488 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.148 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 5 5
Grammar and spelling errors:
Line 1, column 92, Rule ID: THE_FALL_SEASON[1]
Message: Use simply 'summer'.
Suggestion: summer
...er of accidents involving mopeds during the summer season, the moped rental companies should be r...
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Line 3, column 724, Rule ID: WHITESPACE_RULE
Message: Possible typo: you repeated a whitespace
Suggestion:
...usion drawn by the author is fallacious. Moreover, the author assumes that the ac...
^^^^^
Line 7, column 945, Rule ID: WHITESPACE_RULE
Message: Possible typo: you repeated a whitespace
Suggestion:
...rder for the policy to work. Overall speaking, imitating the policy a...
^^^^^^
Transition Words or Phrases used:
first, if, may, moreover, nonetheless, really, second, so, then, third, thus, as to, for example, such as, to begin with
Attributes: Values AverageValues Percentages(Values/AverageValues)% => Comments
Performance on Part of Speech:
To be verbs : 28.0 19.6327345309 143% => OK
Auxiliary verbs: 19.0 12.9520958084 147% => OK
Conjunction : 11.0 11.1786427146 98% => OK
Relative clauses : 9.0 13.6137724551 66% => More relative clauses wanted.
Pronoun: 22.0 28.8173652695 76% => OK
Preposition: 72.0 55.5748502994 130% => OK
Nominalization: 13.0 16.3942115768 79% => OK
Performance on vocabulary words:
No of characters: 3022.0 2260.96107784 134% => OK
No of words: 554.0 441.139720559 126% => OK
Chars per words: 5.45487364621 5.12650576532 106% => OK
Fourth root words length: 4.85151570047 4.56307096286 106% => OK
Word Length SD: 3.56751406671 2.78398813304 128% => OK
Unique words: 273.0 204.123752495 134% => OK
Unique words percentage: 0.492779783394 0.468620217663 105% => OK
syllable_count: 921.6 705.55239521 131% => OK
avg_syllables_per_word: 1.7 1.59920159681 106% => OK
A sentence (or a clause, phrase) starts by:
Pronoun: 4.0 4.96107784431 81% => OK
Article: 11.0 8.76447105788 126% => OK
Subordination: 4.0 2.70958083832 148% => OK
Conjunction: 3.0 1.67365269461 179% => OK
Preposition: 6.0 4.22255489022 142% => OK
Performance on sentences:
How many sentences: 21.0 19.7664670659 106% => OK
Sentence length: 26.0 22.8473053892 114% => OK
Sentence length SD: 206.202738006 57.8364921388 357% => The lengths of sentences changed so frequently.
Chars per sentence: 143.904761905 119.503703932 120% => OK
Words per sentence: 26.380952381 23.324526521 113% => OK
Discourse Markers: 5.71428571429 5.70786347227 100% => OK
Paragraphs: 5.0 5.15768463074 97% => OK
Language errors: 3.0 5.25449101796 57% => OK
Sentences with positive sentiment : 5.0 8.20758483034 61% => OK
Sentences with negative sentiment : 10.0 6.88822355289 145% => OK
Sentences with neutral sentiment: 6.0 4.67664670659 128% => OK
What are sentences with positive/Negative/neutral sentiment?
Coherence and Cohesion:
Essay topic to essay body coherence: 0.203375142316 0.218282227539 93% => OK
Sentence topic coherence: 0.0727511428405 0.0743258471296 98% => OK
Sentence topic coherence SD: 0.0759950415067 0.0701772020484 108% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence: 0.122158154194 0.128457276422 95% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence SD: 0.0486508988821 0.0628817314937 77% => OK
Essay readability:
automated_readability_index: 17.4 14.3799401198 121% => OK
flesch_reading_ease: 36.63 48.3550499002 76% => OK
smog_index: 8.8 7.1628742515 123% => OK
flesch_kincaid_grade: 14.6 12.197005988 120% => OK
coleman_liau_index: 14.63 12.5979740519 116% => OK
dale_chall_readability_score: 9.03 8.32208582834 109% => OK
difficult_words: 144.0 98.500998004 146% => OK
linsear_write_formula: 14.0 12.3882235529 113% => OK
gunning_fog: 12.4 11.1389221557 111% => OK
text_standard: 15.0 11.9071856287 126% => OK
What are above readability scores?
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Rates: 66.67 out of 100
Scores by essay e-grader: 4.0 Out of 6
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Note: 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.