The following memorandum is from the business manager of Happy Pancake House restaurants.
"Recently, butter has been replaced by margarine in Happy Pancake House restaurants throughout the southwestern United States. This change, however, has had little impact on our customers. In fact, only about 2 percent of customers have complained, indicating that an average of 98 people out of 100 are happy with the change. Furthermore, many servers have reported that a number of customers who ask for butter do not complain when they are given margarine instead. Clearly, either these customers do not distinguish butter from margarine or they use the term 'butter' to refer to either butter or margarine."
Write a response in which you discuss one or more alternative explanations that could rival the proposed explanation and explain how your explanation(s) can plausibly account for the facts presented in the argument.
This argument cannot convincingly stand because there are some alternative explanations that could plausibly account for the facts presented in the argument.
Firstly, the author states that only about two percent of customers complained about the change. It does not mean that rest of the people are all happy with it. It is likely that some of the people resent the change but stay silent about it; some people do complain about the change but the servers turn a deaf ear to it; some people just do not care with it and they feel neither happy nor unhappy. In all these cases, the percentage of customers who are happy with the change is overestimated.
Secondly, even if the costumers do not complain about the change, this does not necessarily means that either people cannot discern butter from margarine or people do not care about it. Maybe the customers are clearly known about this change, but they do not complain the change because they do not want to quarrel with the servers and make trouble. Although they do not complain it, they will never come to this restaurant again.
Finally, even if it can be assumed that people in the survey are happy with the change, it does not mean the change has little impact on customers, since the survey is most likely to be performed in a restaurant with such change. Because people will not come to such a restaurant again if they hate the change, the survey will fail to achieve its goal by missing the people who dislike the change and thus, lead to a questionable conclusion that the change has little impact on customers. To better evaluate the impact of the change, it is more reasonable to compare the number of people consuming in the restaurant before and after the change.
argument 1 -- OK
argument 2 -- OK
argument 3 -- OK.
flaws:
Need a conclusion paragraph like this.
para 1: introduction
para 2: argument 1
para 3: argument 2
para 4: argument 3
para 5: conclusion
Attribute Value Ideal
Score: 4.5 out of 6
Category: Good Excellent
No. of Grammatical Errors: 0 2
No. of Spelling Errors: 0 2
No. of Sentences: 11 15
No. of Words: 304 350
No. of Characters: 1401 1500
No. of Different Words: 131 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.176 4.7
Average Word Length: 4.609 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.336 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 100 100
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 54 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 34 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 25 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 27.636 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 12.287 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.545 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.46 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.693 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.168 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 4 5