The following appeared as part of an article in a business magazine.
"A recent study rating 300 male and female Mentian advertising executives according to the average number of hours they sleep per night showed an association between the amount of sleep the executives need and the success of their firms. Of the advertising firms studied, those whose executives reported needing no more than 6 hours of sleep per night had higher profit margins and faster growth. These results suggest that if a business wants to prosper, it should hire only people who need less than 6 hours of sleep per night."
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 the passage, we are informed that margarine replacement with butter has little impact on customer of Happy Pancake House restaurants. By citing that feedbacks from both customers and servants, the author ascribes this phenomenon to the reason that customers either cannot distinguish difference between them or term "butter" is indiscriminately used by customers. Quite convincing though such explanation appears at first glance, we cannot safely draw a conclusion that it is the unique one that accounts for the facts presented in the argument. Therefore, we need more explanations which could rival with the one given in the argument.
To start off, the author attributes little customers' complains to their satisfaction about such change. While this may be true, such situation may result from other reasons as well. First of all, it is possible that most of customers lack available channels to vent their angry about this sudden product change. If this is the case, just 2 percent of negative feedbacks could have nothing to do with customers' real attitudes. Thus, the seemingly less complains could be explained as stemming from no way to send their dissatisfactions back to the company. Second, while such statistics appear optimistic at fist glance, it is of equal probability that the survey had been conducted with limited responders. If we can prove that only a small proportion of end customers had joined such survey, the underlying logic of the author will be weakened, namely: 2 percent of customers' complains well demonstrate their contentment about such replacement.
Furthermore, the servants' report may lend more support to the author's conclusion about less deleterious results caused by this product change. However, few negative message from servants may presumably originate from other factors as well. For example, customers hurried up with their own business, having no time for whining this unreasonable change. And their indifferent attitudes has been misrepresented by servants as a kind of satisfaction. Moreover, servants in Happy Pancake House restaurants may distort or even conceal the fact of customers' frustrations in order to please their senior management team. Without additional investigations, we cannot decide which factor could finally lead to such positive feedback from servants. It is even likely that all of the aforementioned factors have conspired to this phenomenon.
Last but not least, while customers from Happy Pancake House restaurants are contented with such replacement, it is reckless to claim that this attitude results from their inability from discriminating those two products, or their understanding about the term 'butter'. Other factors may lead to the aforementioned situation. For example, they are extremely busy with their own business so that the replacement of butter seems inconsequential. Or, they intended to try with different alternatives instead of sticking to a single product. If either of two is true, then the author's explanation may become untenable.
In summary, while the two reasons given by the author seem compelling to some degree, in the absence of sufficient information, we cannot establish a causal relationship between them and little complain from customers in Happy Pancake House restaurants. Therefore, the root cause of the aforementioned phenomenon is such a case that we should consider more explanations which could account for the facts presented in the argument.
Comments
e-rater score report
Attribute Value Ideal
Final score: 4.0 out of 6
Category: Good Excellent
No. of Grammatical Errors: 0 2
No. of Spelling Errors: 2 2
No. of Sentences: 25 15
No. of Words: 536 350
No. of Characters: 2869 1500
No. of Different Words: 258 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.812 4.7
Average Word Length: 5.353 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.969 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 213 100
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 163 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 125 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 92 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 21.44 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 8.556 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.8 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.287 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.468 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.094 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 5 5
Grammar and spelling errors:
Line 2, column 258, Rule ID: NON3PRS_VERB[2]
Message: The pronoun 'we' must be used with a non-third-person form of a verb: 'do'
Suggestion: do
... this from his study for a few days, we does not know what will be the affects if le...
^^^^
Line 3, column 737, Rule ID: WHITESPACE_RULE
Message: Possible typo: you repeated a whitespace
Suggestion:
... If either of these scenarios hold true, then the authors contention suggesting t...
^^
Line 3, column 748, Rule ID: POSSESIVE_APOSTROPHE[1]
Message: Possible typo: apostrophe is missing. Did you mean 'authors'' or 'author's'?
Suggestion: authors'; author's
...of these scenarios hold true, then the authors contention suggesting that business sho...
^^^^^^^
Line 4, column 732, Rule ID: ALLOW_TO[1]
Message: Did you mean 'following'? Or maybe you should add a pronoun? In active voice, 'convince' + 'to' takes an object, usually a pronoun.
Suggestion: following
...ommendations will do little to convince to follow a six hours sleeping schedule. In con...
^^^^^^^^^
Transition Words or Phrases used:
finally, first, furthermore, however, if, may, really, second, so, then, thus, apart from, at least, in conclusion, such as, first of all
Attributes: Values AverageValues Percentages(Values/AverageValues)% => Comments
Performance on Part of Speech:
To be verbs : 18.0 19.6327345309 92% => OK
Auxiliary verbs: 17.0 12.9520958084 131% => OK
Conjunction : 18.0 11.1786427146 161% => OK
Relative clauses : 28.0 13.6137724551 206% => Less relative clauses wanted (maybe 'which' is over used).
Pronoun: 46.0 28.8173652695 160% => Less pronouns wanted
Preposition: 47.0 55.5748502994 85% => OK
Nominalization: 9.0 16.3942115768 55% => More nominalizations (nouns with a suffix like: tion ment ence ance) wanted.
Performance on vocabulary words:
No of characters: 2785.0 2260.96107784 123% => OK
No of words: 562.0 441.139720559 127% => OK
Chars per words: 4.95551601423 5.12650576532 97% => OK
Fourth root words length: 4.86893614481 4.56307096286 107% => OK
Word Length SD: 2.58479687477 2.78398813304 93% => OK
Unique words: 241.0 204.123752495 118% => OK
Unique words percentage: 0.428825622776 0.468620217663 92% => More unique words wanted or less content wanted.
syllable_count: 837.9 705.55239521 119% => OK
avg_syllables_per_word: 1.5 1.59920159681 94% => OK
A sentence (or a clause, phrase) starts by:
Pronoun: 5.0 4.96107784431 101% => OK
Article: 6.0 8.76447105788 68% => OK
Subordination: 4.0 2.70958083832 148% => OK
Conjunction: 2.0 1.67365269461 119% => OK
Preposition: 3.0 4.22255489022 71% => OK
Performance on sentences:
How many sentences: 18.0 19.7664670659 91% => OK
Sentence length: 31.0 22.8473053892 136% => The Avg. Sentence Length is relatively long.
Sentence length SD: 54.8687547418 57.8364921388 95% => OK
Chars per sentence: 154.722222222 119.503703932 129% => OK
Words per sentence: 31.2222222222 23.324526521 134% => OK
Discourse Markers: 7.61111111111 5.70786347227 133% => OK
Paragraphs: 5.0 5.15768463074 97% => OK
Language errors: 4.0 5.25449101796 76% => OK
Sentences with positive sentiment : 11.0 8.20758483034 134% => OK
Sentences with negative sentiment : 4.0 6.88822355289 58% => 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: 0.25110140136 0.218282227539 115% => OK
Sentence topic coherence: 0.092964039437 0.0743258471296 125% => OK
Sentence topic coherence SD: 0.0764978394955 0.0701772020484 109% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence: 0.145696888161 0.128457276422 113% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence SD: 0.063050030926 0.0628817314937 100% => OK
Essay readability:
automated_readability_index: 17.5 14.3799401198 122% => OK
flesch_reading_ease: 48.47 48.3550499002 100% => OK
smog_index: 8.8 7.1628742515 123% => OK
flesch_kincaid_grade: 14.2 12.197005988 116% => OK
coleman_liau_index: 12.08 12.5979740519 96% => OK
dale_chall_readability_score: 8.1 8.32208582834 97% => OK
difficult_words: 104.0 98.500998004 106% => OK
linsear_write_formula: 14.5 12.3882235529 117% => OK
gunning_fog: 14.4 11.1389221557 129% => OK
text_standard: 15.0 11.9071856287 126% => OK
What are above readability scores?
---------------------
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.