GRE ARGUMENT ESSAY - PLEASE GRADE AND CRITIQUE

[imonfire98]

Nature's Way, a chain of stores selling health food and other health-related products, is opening its next franchise in the town of Plainsville. The store should prove to be very successful: Nature's Way franchises tend to be most profitable in areas where residents lead healthy lives, and clearly Plainsville is such an area. Plainsville merchants report that sales of running shoes and exercise clothing are at all-time highs. The local health club has more members than ever, and the weight training and aerobics classes are always full. Finally, Plainsville's schoolchildren represent a new generation of potential customers: these schoolchildren are required to participate in a fitness-for-life program, which emphasizes the benefits of regular exercise at an early age.

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.

 

MY RESPONSE

 

Although the paragraphs aims to provide a very compelling argument, its logic is very flawed as the paragraph makes a lot of assumptions with very few evidence.

 

First, the assumption that the health foods store will be successful in an area where a lot of people live healthy lives is based on really vague information. For example, the company states that it sells a lot of health foods and health related goods but these health related goods may not be relevant to the people of Plainsville who mainly focus of physical activity. Also, the emphasizes the relevance of the healthy lifestyle practiced by the residents in the town.  However, without a concrete definition for ‘healthy lifestyle’ it is definitely possible to assume that the people of Plainsville may not be interested in health foods.

 

Similarly, the article used the reports from sales of running shoes, exercise clothings and frequent visits to the local health club as a locus of comparison. The problem here lie in the fact that the author is comparing two distinct things that should not be correlated without any empirical evidence. There indeed has to be a strong positive correlation between the residents physical activity level and the degree to which they endorse healthy eating for this assumption to be relevant.

 

Finally, the author seems to ignore a basic fact of life which is that things change. Let’s assume that the current residents of Plainsville endorse healthy eating and are willing to invest in it. Expecting the following generations to be exactly like their predecessors is a farfetched. In such a situation, the argument can only remain true if the grandchildren are duplicates of their parents in the way they endorse lifestyle practices, in the amount of income earned and their willingness to invest in healthy foods.

 

The presence of multiple undefined variables make this argument extremely flawed. To make a better argument, one will have to analyze empirical data for correlations.