The following appeared in a letter to the editor of the Balmer Island Gazette.
"On BalmerIsland, 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 BalmerIsland 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 of this editorial recommends that to reduce accidents involving mopeds and pedestrians, Balmer Island’s city council should restrict moped rentals. To support this conclusion, the author cites the fact that last year, when nearby Seaville Island enforced similar measures, its rate of moped accidents fell by 50%. However, these all constitute a problematic and vulnerable support for the author’s recommendation.
A threshold problem involves the author’s fail of considering other possible explanations for Balmer’s moped accidents. Perhaps the road infrastructures are poor in Balmer and lack of lights in the dark night makes moped ridders hard to recognize pedestrians. Or perhaps extreme weather events like storm and heavy rain occurs frequently and aggravate traffic safety. Without answering whether those scenarios are ruled out or not, the editor cannot establish a cause-and-effect relationship between utilization of mopeds and occurrence of accidents upon which the editor’s recommendation depends.
Yet another flaw of the argument is the ambiguous number of the annual reduction in moped accidents in Seaville. The 50% decline rate does not necessarily reflect the actual number of accidents. For example, there may be 20 moped accidents happened in Seaville before, while this figure only decreased to 10 by last year, which is not a remarkable achievement. Thus, it is impossible to indicate the effectiveness of such restrictions.
Even supposing that rental limitation is powerful, it is baseless for the author to indicate that it will also yield the same result this year. This is because things rarely remain the same over extended period. For example, the number of pedestrians might increase in the future; with more pedestrians, especially tourists, the risk of moped-pedestrian accidents would probably increase. Also, with a restricted supply of rental mopeds, people might purchase mopeds instead, which makes the total usage of mopeds remain or even rise. Any of these cases and other possible changes, if true, would serve to undermine the proposed restrictions.
Finally, even if such limitation works in Seaville, it is unclear whether it suits Balmer or not. Such poor analogy between the two islands falsely depends on the presumption that they share the identical traffic condition. In fact, it is entirely possible that with strict traffic rules, mopeds ridders are less dare to violate the rules, such as riding on the sidewalk and yielding to pedestrians in crosswalks, and thus contributes to the traffic safety. By contrast, citizens of Balmer tend to ignore traffic laws and often walk on the cycling roads, which puts themselves in danger. In short, without accounting for possible differences between these two islands, the arguer cannot prove that Balmer will reap the similar benefits from the proposed methods.
To sum up, the arguer fails to substantiate the recommendation of limiting mopeds rentals because the questions discussed above do not lead strong support to what the arguer suggests. To make the argument more convincing, the author would have to give more information regard to the causes of accidents, comprehensive evaluation of rental restriction policy and specific traffic conditions in both islands.
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: 23 15
No. of Words: 505 350
No. of Characters: 2709 1500
No. of Different Words: 274 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.74 4.7
Average Word Length: 5.364 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.855 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 221 100
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 163 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 113 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 72 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 21.957 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 7.16 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.478 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.273 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.53 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.06 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 6 5
Transition Words or Phrases used:
also, but, finally, however, if, may, so, thus, while, for example, in short, such as, as a result, to sum up
Attributes: Values AverageValues Percentages(Values/AverageValues)% => Comments
Performance on Part of Speech:
To be verbs : 15.0 19.6327345309 76% => OK
Auxiliary verbs: 12.0 12.9520958084 93% => OK
Conjunction : 18.0 11.1786427146 161% => OK
Relative clauses : 11.0 13.6137724551 81% => OK
Pronoun: 24.0 28.8173652695 83% => OK
Preposition: 72.0 55.5748502994 130% => OK
Nominalization: 19.0 16.3942115768 116% => OK
Performance on vocabulary words:
No of characters: 3003.0 2260.96107784 133% => OK
No of words: 527.0 441.139720559 119% => OK
Chars per words: 5.69829222011 5.12650576532 111% => OK
Fourth root words length: 4.79129216042 4.56307096286 105% => OK
Word Length SD: 3.15652239245 2.78398813304 113% => OK
Unique words: 292.0 204.123752495 143% => OK
Unique words percentage: 0.554079696395 0.468620217663 118% => OK
syllable_count: 923.4 705.55239521 131% => OK
avg_syllables_per_word: 1.8 1.59920159681 113% => OK
A sentence (or a clause, phrase) starts by:
Pronoun: 7.0 4.96107784431 141% => OK
Article: 10.0 8.76447105788 114% => OK
Subordination: 5.0 2.70958083832 185% => OK
Conjunction: 4.0 1.67365269461 239% => Less conjunction wanted as sentence beginning.
Preposition: 8.0 4.22255489022 189% => OK
Performance on sentences:
How many sentences: 24.0 19.7664670659 121% => OK
Sentence length: 21.0 22.8473053892 92% => OK
Sentence length SD: 41.5398068791 57.8364921388 72% => OK
Chars per sentence: 125.125 119.503703932 105% => OK
Words per sentence: 21.9583333333 23.324526521 94% => OK
Discourse Markers: 4.54166666667 5.70786347227 80% => OK
Paragraphs: 6.0 5.15768463074 116% => OK
Language errors: 0.0 5.25449101796 0% => OK
Sentences with positive sentiment : 5.0 8.20758483034 61% => OK
Sentences with negative sentiment : 16.0 6.88822355289 232% => Less negative sentences wanted.
Sentences with neutral sentiment: 3.0 4.67664670659 64% => OK
What are sentences with positive/Negative/neutral sentiment?
Coherence and Cohesion:
Essay topic to essay body coherence: 0.159408109567 0.218282227539 73% => OK
Sentence topic coherence: 0.0451172338251 0.0743258471296 61% => OK
Sentence topic coherence SD: 0.0469749448772 0.0701772020484 67% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence: 0.0835582996794 0.128457276422 65% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence SD: 0.0435801377283 0.0628817314937 69% => OK
Essay readability:
automated_readability_index: 16.4 14.3799401198 114% => OK
flesch_reading_ease: 33.24 48.3550499002 69% => OK
smog_index: 8.8 7.1628742515 123% => OK
flesch_kincaid_grade: 13.8 12.197005988 113% => OK
coleman_liau_index: 15.78 12.5979740519 125% => OK
dale_chall_readability_score: 9.71 8.32208582834 117% => OK
difficult_words: 168.0 98.500998004 171% => OK
linsear_write_formula: 12.0 12.3882235529 97% => OK
gunning_fog: 10.4 11.1389221557 93% => OK
text_standard: 16.0 11.9071856287 134% => OK
What are above readability scores?
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Rates: 83.33 out of 100
Scores by essay e-grader: 5.0 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.