Claim: The best way to understand the character of a society is to examine the character of the men and women that the society chooses as its heroes or its role models.
Reason: Heroes and role models reveal a society's highest ideals.
Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which to you agree or disagree with the claim and the reason on which that claim is based.
Understanding the character of a society goes much beyond to just examine their role models. In order to do it in a successul manner, we need to have a lot of data in hands and not only believe that our heroes and role models reveal a society's highest ideals.
A society has a lot of issues to be examined, like: the quality of education, transportation, unemployment, conditions of health, richness and so on. Also, the society has been changing over the years. For example, I live in São Paulo and there has been a lot of economic changes here over the years. Ten years ago, we had, only in São Paulo, around one million people unemployed, and now things have been getting better, counting around one hundred thousand people unemployed. Moreover, there was more than five hundred thousand people who did not even know how to write and now there was almost ninety percent less of this number. So, there still a lot to improve to get people a job and teach them how to write, but my point is, we cannot judge a society based on their heros.
In São Paulo, we had a hero who really helped us in some issues. Her name is Marta Suplicy and she had been the governator of São Paulo for eight years until 2018. She improved a lot our society by giving people a job and teach them and she was really thanked from the population because of that. However, a society is much more complex than that, it has much more issues to be considered and examine her character does not necessarly mean examine our society. She only helped us in two of our biggest problems, but what about security, health and transportation, for example? São Paulo has been considered one of the most dangerous cities in Brazil and nobody give the right attention to it. Ultimately, examine the character of Marta does not mean examine our character.
In conclusion, not always our heroes and role models reveal a society's highest ideals. The conditions of the population cannot be mirrored from their role models, because our society, with all of their issues and differences is much more complex than the character of a single person.
The following appeared in a memo from the director of student housing at Buckingham College.
"To serve the housing needs of our students, Buckingham College should build a number of new dormitories. Buckingham's enrollment is growing and, based on current trends, will double over the next 50 years, thus making existing dormitory space inadequate. Moreover, the average rent for an apartment in our town has risen in recent years. Consequently, students will find it increasingly difficult to afford off-campus housing. Finally, attractive new dormitories would make prospective students more likely to enroll at Buckingham."
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 director of student house at Buckingham College made a lot of assumptions without having real data and information to prove his points. Saying that the quantity of students will double in 50 years, that the students cannot afford to live in an off-campus apartment and that new dormitories will attract more students are merely vague assumptions and theorys without proofs. Let's discuss each of them in the next paragraphs.
First, the director stated that based on current trends, the quantity of students will double over the next 50 years and then the existing dormitory space will be inadequate. But the question is: How does he know that 50 years from now the quantity of students will double? Things change over the time. Maybe, according to current trends there has been increasing the number of students living in the campus house, but it does not mean that every single year, upon the next 50 years, this number will increase as well until it doubles. In order to streghten his argument, he needs to show all of his numbers, based on his trends and also predict some improvement over the next couple of years. Predict something in a long-term with current trends open space for a big standard deviation, which weaken his argument.
Second, the director assumed that all the students will not be able to afford living in off-campus apartments due to some rise in the rent of the apartmentes in town. The director did not say anything about how much the rent in town apartements has risen over the years, he just said that the students will not be able to rent an apartment off-campus because is too expensive these days for them. On the other hand, the director should have shown the average of cost to rent an apartment in town nowadays and that, according to the financial situation of some of the students - and now all of them- will not be able to move there.
