The following appeared in a memo from the vice president of a company that builds shopping malls around the country.
“The surface of a section of Route 101, paved just two years ago by Good Intentions Roadways, is now badly cracked with a number of dangerous potholes. In another part of the state, a section of Route 40, paved by Appian Roadways more than four years ago, is still in good condition. In a demonstration of their continuing commitment to quality, Appian Roadways recently purchased state-of-the-art paving machinery and hired a new quality-control manager. Therefore, I recommend hiring Appian Roadways to construct the access roads for all our new shopping malls. I predict that our Appian access roads will not have to be repaired for at least four years.”
Write a response in which you discuss what questions would need to be answered in order to decide whether the recommendation is likely to have the predicted result. Be sure to explain how the answers to these questions would help to evaluate the recommendation.
In this memo, the writer recommends that hiring Appian Roadways (RA) would be better than its rival Good Intentions Roadway (GIR) in many respects. Also, it is predicted that if RA is hired, there will be no need to repair the roads in at least four years. However, the argument relies on a series of unconvincing assumptions which each can be questioned in one or another way.
The first question that needs to be replied is whether the author assumes that Route 101 and 40 are identical in all respects. However, no evidence is rendered to prove this assumption. Maybe Route 101 is in a region that the temperature of weather alters dramatically; thus, such rapid changes were the chief reason of the damage. It is also probable that Route 101 is specialized for heavy vehicles, such as trucks, while Route 40 is a narrow street in the suburb. Without accounting for these or other possible dissimilarity the writer cannot defend the conclusion.
Additionally, even assuming that there is strong resemblance between two mentioned roads, there is still another problem with the premises. Is just hiring a new quality control manager an indication of a great advantage in AP? Emphatically no, the writer provides no evidence to show that this is the case. As a likely, it is possible that the ex-manager proposed with a higher salary in GIR, and after that AP was to hire an amateur manager. Therefore, the writer cannot justifiably predict that the new manager is better than the previous one.
Does GIR purchase state-of-art paving machinery? If so, drawing a comparison is necessarily in order to bring about reliable premises. As it is evidence, the writer assumes that mentioning some early conducted changes in AR will suffice to means that AR is in higher level of modern technology than that of AP.
In sum, the argument rests on a series of unsubstantiated assumption and the writer should address mentioned question to convince the readers.
Thank your very much of your help.
Mahsa Ghaffari