The following memorandum is from the business manager of Happy Pancake House restaurants."Recently, butter has been replaced by margarine in Happy Pancake House restaurants throughout the southwestern United States.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 im

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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"Recently, butter has been replaced by margarine in Happy Pancake House restaurants throughout the southwestern United States.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.

The author of this argument recommends that in the southeast and northeast restaurants of the Happy Pancake House the managers or chief cooks should replace the margarine with butter to avoid expense of buying butter and he or she assumes this by resting of some information from southwestern restaurant of Happy Pancake House. However, this recommendation rests on a number of premises which are not plausible nor justifiable.

The threshold drawbacks is that the change of the foods tastes. Maybe the cook use margarine in some special foods that their tastes don’t change remarkably, or maybe the cook uses other taste adding materials so that the customers can’t differentiate the taste change. Maybe people are complacent with the special food taste in generally and they don’t know about the change of margarine and are indifferent or even happy with the taste but they shun to use the food if they know it contains margarine. Besides, to avoid the change of taste the chief cook perhaps have to use more tasting material which itself leads to more costs for restaurants.

The other foible is when the author hints to report of many server about a number of customers who still ask for butter and do not complain when they are given margarine instead, it is not clear that some of the customers means what proportion of them , does it mean all customers or just a 5 or 10 percent of them? maybe the customers didn’t expect from the restaurant or may be these customers prefer not to complain on petty issues such as change of the butter taste and maybes instead of reacting they suddenly stop going to tat restaurant.

It is obvious customers are different in each region, so just by gathering data from one restaurant in southwestern, we cannot predict such satisfactory will be waiting for managers of all restaurant in north and west when it is not clear how is their tendency toward margarine taste .there is two different scenario may occur in other restaurants. first, may be their customers never complain about butter replacement but because of the change in whole food taste they gradually change their restaurant which leads to lose customers. second scenario is that they complain about the taste then again may lead in losing some customers too. So the condition of one restaurant does not similar to others.

In sum, according to what is mentioned above the author recommendation is full of foibles. To prescribe such change as replacement of margarine with butter, the author should provide plausible evidences so that convince other restaurant managers or chief cooks and provide a guarantee to keeping the old customers or even increasing the number of them. While still it is not clear that changing margarine with butter can decrease the cost, the recommendation seems unjustifiable.

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argument 1 -- not exactly

argument 2 -- not OK

argument 3 -- not exactly
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flaws:
This is a topic for new GRE. read the requirements: 'Write a response in which you discuss one or more alternative explanations...'. it means there are no loopholes, you need to give alternative explanations.

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http://www.testbig.com/gmatgre-essays/following-memorandum-business-man…

Attribute Value Ideal
Score: 3.0 out of 6
Category: Satisfactory Excellent
No. of Grammatical Errors: 11 2
No. of Spelling Errors: 5 2
No. of Sentences: 14 15
No. of Words: 473 350
No. of Characters: 2304 1500
No. of Different Words: 204 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.664 4.7
Average Word Length: 4.871 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.664 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 154 100
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 109 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 85 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 66 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 33.786 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 25.414 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.714 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.353 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.613 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.133 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 5 5