The following appeared in a memorandum from the planning department of an electric power company."Several recent surveys indicate that home owners are increasingly eager to conserve energy. At the same time, manufacturers are now marketing many home appli

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The following appeared in a memorandum from the planning department of an electric power company.

"Several recent surveys indicate that home owners are increasingly eager to conserve energy. At the same time, manufacturers are now marketing many home appliances, such as refrigerators and air conditioners, that are almost twice as energy efficient as those sold a decade ago. Also, new technologies for better home insulation and passive solar heating are readily available to reduce the energy needed for home heating. Therefore, the total demand for electricity in our area will not increase—and may decline slightly. Since our three electric generating plants in operation for the past twenty years have always met our needs, construction of new generating plants will not be necessary."

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.

Though argument put forward by the author stating that there is no requirement for construction of new generating plants, is not compelling enough.It can be made cogent by adding evidences which either corroborates or invalidates it's claim.Either way an analysis of evidence is much needed to make the argument credible.

Primarily, the author did not specify the source of the survey,so the validity of the data is skeptical.The methodologies used in the survey will affect the result.If the survey was based on a small population,the result might vary for a larger population and also the class of people on whom the survey was conducted also will effect the results.So the results of this survey are unsubstantiated.

One of the most important fallacious assumptions from the arguer claims that as the appliances like AC and fridge have become energy efficient, so the conservation of energy is viable.But the author needs to provide insight into the cost factor and the usage time of these appliances.Cost factor means , the number of people able to afford to buy and replace those appliances at the cost they are available with the already existing ones in their house.And also the number of hours of usage will also effect the authors claims.For example, a decade ago AC's and fridges were used for 2-3 hours daily,but now a days they are being used for the whole day. So even if they have become energy efficient, with the increase in the application running time, energy is still not conserved.The author also excluded the possibility of many people using conservative methods like heaters rather than adopt to the new techniques like solar heating,etc.

Finally , other options need to be exploited is the constantly increasing population.So as the energy consumption is directly proportional to the population,more generating plants are required to satisfy the increasing population's demands.

Except an insight is provided into these possibilities and many more, it is difficult to conclude that there are enough generating plants are already present to meet the population's needs and that there is no requirement for more.While it might be true that the public are eager to conserve energy and that there is enough energy to meet all their basics,the writer needs to provide further evidences to corroborate his preposition.

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Average: 6 (2 votes)
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will effect the results
will affect the results

argument 1 -- not OK

argument 2 -- OK

argument 3 -- OK

flaws:
Always put a space after punctuation marks. Essay e-rater is sensitive.

Attribute Value Ideal
Score: 3.5 out of 6
Category: Satisfactory Excellent
No. of Grammatical Errors: 1 2
No. of Spelling Errors: 0 2
No. of Sentences: 7 15
No. of Words: 394 350
No. of Characters: 1926 1500
No. of Different Words: 204 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.455 4.7
Average Word Length: 4.888 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.683 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 142 100
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 86 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 61 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 47 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 26.286 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 9.638 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.857 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.432 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.835 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.063 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 5 5