In surveys Mason City residents rank water sports (swimming, boating, and fishing) among their favorite recreational activities. The Mason River flowing through the city is rarely used for these pursuits, however, and the city park department devotes little of its budget to maintaining riverside recreational facilities. For years there have been complaints from residents about the quality of the river's water and the river's smell. In response, the state has recently announced plans to clean up Mason River. Use of the river for water sports is, therefore, sure to increase. The city government should for that reason devote more money in this year's budget to riverside recreational facilities.
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.
The author concludes in this argument that the city government should allot more money in this year’s budget to riverside recreation as it is the favorite recreation of Mason city residents based on few assumptions which he makes are unsubstantiated.
The first assumption the author makes is water sports being the favorite recreational activities of Mason city residents, where he does not give any statistical evidence showing the number of people being surveyed and their interests in playing water sports or just watching them. Even if the survey shows more number of denizen’s favorite recreational activity is water sports it is not clear whether the survey was conducted in the counties near the Mason river.It is more likely the counties near the river are to benefit from cleaning of the river.
As the residents, have been complaining about the water quality and the smell of the water, state has announced to the cleaning of river. The bad quality and smell of water may be for several reasons like industrial wastes, domestic wastes may be dumped in the river and there may be no proper regulation for maintenance of the river. So strict rules have to be implemented to keep the water clean in near future.
The number of residents living in area near Mason River may be very few and devoting more money would not make sense. There may be other emergency need which requires to be addressed with more funds than maintenance of a river for recreation sports.
This argument could be strengthened if the author provides more details of the survey like the number residents, their interest in water sports participating or watching, the cause of the smell and bad quality of water. It can be made strong further reporting if similar increase of river water for water in other states have improved after increasing funds in the budget.
flaws:
Better to put one more reason to support.
Attribute Value Ideal
Score: 4.0 out of 6
Category: Satisfactory Excellent
No. of Grammatical Errors: 0 2
No. of Spelling Errors: 0 2
No. of Sentences: 10 15
No. of Words: 312 350
No. of Characters: 1513 1500
No. of Different Words: 149 200
Fourth Root of Number of Words: 4.203 4.7
Average Word Length: 4.849 4.6
Word Length SD: 2.576 2.4
No. of Words greater than 5 chars: 97 100
No. of Words greater than 6 chars: 67 80
No. of Words greater than 7 chars: 55 40
No. of Words greater than 8 chars: 34 20
Use of Passive Voice (%): 0 0
Avg. Sentence Length: 31.2 21.0
Sentence Length SD: 10.352 7.5
Use of Discourse Markers (%): 0.8 0.12
Sentence-Text Coherence: 0.441 0.35
Sentence-Para Coherence: 0.666 0.50
Sentence-Sentence Coherence: 0.139 0.07
Number of Paragraphs: 4 5