The following appeared as a recommendation by a committee planning a ten year budget for the city of Calatrava The birthrate in our city is declining in fact last year s birthrate was only one half that of five years ago Thus the number of students enroll | TOEFL IELTS GMAT GRE SAT ACT PTE ESL

Essay topics:

The following appeared as a recommendation by a committee planning a ten-year budget for the city of Calatrava.
"The birthrate in our city is declining: in fact, last year's birthrate was only one-half that of five years ago. Thus the number of students enrolled in our public schools will soon decrease dramatically, and we can safely reduce the funds budgeted for education during the next decade. At the same time, we can reduce funding for athletic playing fields and other recreational facilities. As a result, we will have sufficient money to fund city facilities and programs used primarily by adults, since we can expect the adult population of the city to increase."
Write a response in which you discuss what specific evidence is needed to evaluate the argument and explain how the evidence would weaken or strengthen the argument.

The committee makes an argument for reducing the funds given to schools, athletic playing fields and other recreational facilities. The committee's conclusion is based on the fact that the birthrate in the city is declining, and that reducing these funds would allow them to allocate more funds for facilities used by adults. However, the argument makes a number of assumptions, which, if proven false, would cause the argument to fall apart.

Firstly, only the birthrate of the previous year is compared to that of five years ago. Perhaps the birthrate last year was unusually low and it has been consistently high in the four years before that. It is also possible that the birthrate five years ago was unusually high. Any of these two years may very well be an outlier. If this is true, the number of students will not decrease and reducing the budget for schools and recreational facilities will not be justified. More data needs to be taken into consideration and compared for the argument to be viable.

Second, it is wrongly assumed that adults do not use athletic playing fields and such recreational facilities. There is potential that a number of athletes live in the city of Calatrava, who frequently use these facilities. It is also quite possible that many of the citizens are very health conscious, and participate in sports to keep fit. In this case, reducing the funding to playing fields would not be a good decision on the committee's part. Some information must be provided on the users of these facilities and whether it actually makes sense to reduce funding to them.

Lastly, nothing has been said about the funds currently budgeted for schools and recreational facilities. Maybe the funds currently given to these facilities is already low, and diverting them to these other facilities may not have a significant effect. In such a case, reducing and diverting these funds just does not make sense because, even if it is justified, it will not make any difference to the facilities these funds are siphoned into. We need to know more about the current budget along with the funds given to schools and recreational facilities.

Therefore, it is clear that the committee's argument is flawed and needs more information to be evaluated. If data could be provided which clarifies the validity of the assumptions mentioned above, the conclusion may be justified. However, without this data, it just does not hold water.

Votes

Essay Categories

GMAT/GRE Argument Task

Comments

Essay evaluations by e-grader

Grammar and spelling errors:
Line 1, column 137, Rule ID: POSSESIVE_APOSTROPHE[1]
Message: Possible typo: apostrophe is missing. Did you mean 'committees'' or 'committee's'?
Suggestion: committees'; committee's
... and other recreational facilities. The committees conclusion is based on the fact that th...
^^^^^^^^^^
Line 9, column 33, Rule ID: POSSESIVE_APOSTROPHE[1]
Message: Possible typo: apostrophe is missing. Did you mean 'committees'' or 'committee's'?
Suggestion: committees'; committee's
...ies. Therefore, it is clear that the committees argument is flawed and needs more infor...
^^^^^^^^^^

Transition Words or Phrases used:
actually, also, first, firstly, however, if, lastly, may, second, so, therefore, well

Attributes: Values AverageValues Percentages(Values/AverageValues)% => Comments

Performance on Part of Speech:
To be verbs : 27.0 19.6327345309 138% => OK
Auxiliary verbs: 12.0 12.9520958084 93% => OK
Conjunction : 14.0 11.1786427146 125% => OK
Relative clauses : 11.0 13.6137724551 81% => OK
Pronoun: 33.0 28.8173652695 115% => OK
Preposition: 44.0 55.5748502994 79% => 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: 2041.0 2260.96107784 90% => OK
No of words: 407.0 441.139720559 92% => More content wanted.
Chars per words: 5.01474201474 5.12650576532 98% => OK
Fourth root words length: 4.49157444576 4.56307096286 98% => OK
Word Length SD: 2.73463821576 2.78398813304 98% => OK
Unique words: 180.0 204.123752495 88% => More unique words wanted.
Unique words percentage: 0.44226044226 0.468620217663 94% => More unique words wanted or less content wanted.
syllable_count: 636.3 705.55239521 90% => OK
avg_syllables_per_word: 1.6 1.59920159681 100% => OK

A sentence (or a clause, phrase) starts by:
Pronoun: 7.0 4.96107784431 141% => OK
Article: 5.0 8.76447105788 57% => OK
Subordination: 4.0 2.70958083832 148% => OK
Conjunction: 3.0 1.67365269461 179% => OK
Preposition: 3.0 4.22255489022 71% => OK

Performance on sentences:
How many sentences: 21.0 19.7664670659 106% => OK
Sentence length: 19.0 22.8473053892 83% => The Avg. Sentence Length is relatively short.
Sentence length SD: 34.5255500382 57.8364921388 60% => The essay contains lots of sentences with the similar length. More sentence varieties wanted.
Chars per sentence: 97.1904761905 119.503703932 81% => OK
Words per sentence: 19.380952381 23.324526521 83% => OK
Discourse Markers: 4.04761904762 5.70786347227 71% => OK
Paragraphs: 5.0 5.15768463074 97% => OK
Language errors: 2.0 5.25449101796 38% => OK
Sentences with positive sentiment : 8.0 8.20758483034 97% => OK
Sentences with negative sentiment : 7.0 6.88822355289 102% => 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: 0.196219866502 0.218282227539 90% => OK
Sentence topic coherence: 0.0723238894805 0.0743258471296 97% => OK
Sentence topic coherence SD: 0.102178918227 0.0701772020484 146% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence: 0.10736374995 0.128457276422 84% => OK
Paragraph topic coherence SD: 0.124028740008 0.0628817314937 197% => OK

Essay readability:
automated_readability_index: 11.9 14.3799401198 83% => Automated_readability_index is low.
flesch_reading_ease: 52.19 48.3550499002 108% => OK
smog_index: 8.8 7.1628742515 123% => OK
flesch_kincaid_grade: 10.7 12.197005988 88% => OK
coleman_liau_index: 11.78 12.5979740519 94% => OK
dale_chall_readability_score: 7.49 8.32208582834 90% => OK
difficult_words: 75.0 98.500998004 76% => More difficult words wanted.
linsear_write_formula: 11.0 12.3882235529 89% => OK
gunning_fog: 9.6 11.1389221557 86% => OK
text_standard: 12.0 11.9071856287 101% => OK
What are above readability scores?

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Rates: 50.0 out of 100
Scores by essay e-grader: 3.0 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.

Essay evaluations by e-grader

Transition Words or Phrases used:
actually, also, first, firstly, however, if, lastly, may, second, so, therefore, well

Attributes: Values AverageValues Percentages(Values/AverageValues)% => Comments