The following appeared in a letter from a homeowner to a friend.
"Of the two leading real estate firms in our town—Adams Realty and Fitch Realty—Adams Realty is clearly superior. Adams has 40 real estate agents; in contrast, Fitch has 25, many of whom work only parttime. Moreover, Adams' revenue last year was twice as high as that of Fitch and included home sales that averaged $168,000, compared to Fitch's $144,000. Homes listed with Adams sell faster as well: ten years ago I listed my home with Fitch, and it took more than four months to sell; last year, when I sold another home, I listed it with Adams, and it took only one month. Thus, if you want to sell your home quickly and at a
good price, you should use Adams Realty."
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.
In this letter the author has made a case that of the two leading real estate firms in his/her town Adams Realty is the superior one. Although it might be true that Adams Realty is actually the superior firm but the author's reasoning is based on various unstated assumptions which makes this argument shaky at best.
The author has assumed that to compare performance of two firms it is enough to compare just the average home sales. It is a well known fact in economics that merely comparing averages to evaluate the better candidate is not enough. Another important parameter which is widely used for evaluating the performance of various commodities is their variance. In simple words variance tells us how much the values in a dataset actually differ from their mean. If the variance of house sales for both the firms is similar then the author's argument might hold true that Adams reality is the superior firm. If this is not the case and Fitch Realty's variance is extremely less than that of Adams Reality many customers might actually prefer Fitch Reality because they wish to take lesser risk.
Secondly, one of the major drawbacks of this argument is that the author has assumed he/she can compare the sale of a house which was sold ten years ago with the one sold one year ago. There can be many reasons for the fact that the house on market one year ago was sold faster than the one which was on market ten years ago. It is possible that the house which was sold faster was actually indeed better in terms price, location, quality and various other factors which contributed hugely to it being sold faster. Another possible explanation for this is that the demand in the market for new houses might have been extremely low ten years ago and as a result it took a longer time to sell the house. Therefore, if any of these explanations hold true it would be a huge setback for the author's argument that Adams reality sells the house faster.
Lastly, the author has assumed that hiring many part-time real-estate agents indicates a drawback. This might actually be true but the author needs to supply more evidence that the work done by part time workers is not at par with the work done by full time employees to better support his/her argument.
It might be possible that Adams reality is actually better than Fitch reality but the fact is the author has not made a compelling argument for this case. The author needs to address the various unstated assumptions that have been mentioned in this essay in order to make his/her argument more robust.
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| 2023-08-25 | SanjanaB | 66 | view |
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Comments
e-rater score report
Attribute Value Ideal
Final score: 4.5 out of 6
Category: Good Excellent
No. of Grammatical Errors: 0 2
No. of Spelling Errors: 0 2
No. of Sentences: 17 15
No. of Words: 455 350
No. of Characters: 2081 1500
No. of Different Words: 191 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.619 4.7
Average Word Length: 4.574 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.241 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 134 100
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 92 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 62 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 26 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 26.765 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 6.958 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.706 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.362 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.59 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.167 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 5 5
Grammar and spelling errors:
Line 3, column 526, Rule ID: POSSESIVE_APOSTROPHE[1]
Message: Possible typo: apostrophe is missing. Did you mean 'authors'' or 'author's'?
Suggestion: authors'; author's
... for both the firms is similar then the authors argument might hold true that Adams rea...
^^^^^^^
Line 5, column 789, Rule ID: POSSESIVE_APOSTROPHE[1]
Message: Possible typo: apostrophe is missing. Did you mean 'authors'' or 'author's'?
Suggestion: authors'; author's
...true it would be a huge setback for the authors argument that Adams reality sells the h...
^^^^^^^
Line 7, column 195, Rule ID: EN_COMPOUNDS
Message: This word is normally spelled with hyphen.
Suggestion: part-time
...ply more evidence that the work done by part time workers is not at par with the work don...
^^^^^^^^^
Line 7, column 249, Rule ID: EN_COMPOUNDS
Message: This word is normally spelled as one.
Suggestion: fulltime
...ers is not at par with the work done by full time employees to better support his/her arg...
^^^^^^^^^
Transition Words or Phrases used:
actually, but, if, lastly, second, secondly, so, then, therefore, well, as a result
Attributes: Values AverageValues Percentages(Values/AverageValues)% => Comments
Performance on Part of Speech:
To be verbs : 31.0 19.6327345309 158% => OK
Auxiliary verbs: 9.0 12.9520958084 69% => OK
Conjunction : 6.0 11.1786427146 54% => More conjunction wanted.
Relative clauses : 21.0 13.6137724551 154% => OK
Pronoun: 44.0 28.8173652695 153% => Less pronouns wanted
Preposition: 38.0 55.5748502994 68% => OK
Nominalization: 15.0 16.3942115768 91% => OK
Performance on vocabulary words:
No of characters: 2119.0 2260.96107784 94% => OK
No of words: 451.0 441.139720559 102% => OK
Chars per words: 4.69844789357 5.12650576532 92% => OK
Fourth root words length: 4.60833598836 4.56307096286 101% => OK
Word Length SD: 2.26844331526 2.78398813304 81% => OK
Unique words: 193.0 204.123752495 95% => More unique words wanted.
Unique words percentage: 0.427937915743 0.468620217663 91% => More unique words wanted or less content wanted.
syllable_count: 669.6 705.55239521 95% => OK
avg_syllables_per_word: 1.5 1.59920159681 94% => OK
A sentence (or a clause, phrase) starts by:
Pronoun: 4.0 4.96107784431 81% => OK
Article: 3.0 8.76447105788 34% => OK
Subordination: 4.0 2.70958083832 148% => OK
Conjunction: 0.0 1.67365269461 0% => OK
Preposition: 2.0 4.22255489022 47% => More preposition wanted as sentence beginning.
Performance on sentences:
How many sentences: 17.0 19.7664670659 86% => OK
Sentence length: 26.0 22.8473053892 114% => OK
Sentence length SD: 32.558597693 57.8364921388 56% => The essay contains lots of sentences with the similar length. More sentence varieties wanted.
Chars per sentence: 124.647058824 119.503703932 104% => OK
Words per sentence: 26.5294117647 23.324526521 114% => OK
Discourse Markers: 4.88235294118 5.70786347227 86% => OK
Paragraphs: 5.0 5.15768463074 97% => OK
Language errors: 4.0 5.25449101796 76% => OK
Sentences with positive sentiment : 12.0 8.20758483034 146% => OK
Sentences with negative sentiment : 2.0 6.88822355289 29% => More 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: 0.170663350237 0.218282227539 78% => OK
Sentence topic coherence: 0.0710165791683 0.0743258471296 96% => OK
Sentence topic coherence SD: 0.0993104343863 0.0701772020484 142% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence: 0.126097639851 0.128457276422 98% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence SD: 0.107291307601 0.0628817314937 171% => OK
Essay readability:
automated_readability_index: 14.0 14.3799401198 97% => OK
flesch_reading_ease: 53.55 48.3550499002 111% => OK
smog_index: 3.1 7.1628742515 43% => Smog_index is low.
flesch_kincaid_grade: 12.3 12.197005988 101% => OK
coleman_liau_index: 10.28 12.5979740519 82% => OK
dale_chall_readability_score: 7.83 8.32208582834 94% => OK
difficult_words: 83.0 98.500998004 84% => More difficult words wanted.
linsear_write_formula: 10.5 12.3882235529 85% => OK
gunning_fog: 12.4 11.1389221557 111% => OK
text_standard: 11.0 11.9071856287 92% => OK
What are above readability scores?
---------------------
Rates: 50.0 out of 100
Scores by essay e-grader: 3.0 Out of 6
---------------------
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.