Hello Marijana;
In my opinion your response should get a 4 - 5 out of 6.
While your response was well written, there are a few things that you could do to make it more targeted towards responding to the task.
Let me discuss the biggest issues observed in the given argument.
1. Author assumes that the loss in profitability in the company was because of decentralisation
2. Author also assumes that centralising will not bring about any negative consequences to the company.
You need to focus on these questionable assumptions when discussing the flaws in the argument.
You have done this, yet you have not really shown HOW these assumptions make the argument weak: what could be the implication if they were proved wrong.
Let me show you:
First, the argument readily assumes that because of all operations in one location company would be more profitable.
ideally start by discussing the assumption, here a more exact representation of the assumption would be that "the author assumes that the dip in profits was due to decentralisation" This statement is stretch and not sustained in any way. Nowadays more and more companies are going global. With globalization people will recognize the company, their products, their benefits and make company will make more money. So if company will close down its field offices they will not know their costumers and they will not know what to offer them.
The problem here is that you've detracted from the assumption; focus on the assumption and show what flaws exist in this assumption (the causal flaw); show how this weakens the argument.This is a privilege of office in other location and employees can more efficiently deal with costumers from there.
Second, the argument claims that the company should close down its field offices and conduct all its operations from a single location. The author believe that such a centralization would improve profitability by cutting costs and helping the company maintain better supervision of all employees. Again this sentence is very weak and unsupported claim. Different people - different ideas - profit. For example if the company is making products, people get bored, and employees are soon out of ideas. In one location is not huge variarety. So with different locations employers would encourage employees ideas and company will make good profit out of it.
Again, a better approach for the second body paragraph could have been to discuss the potential negative consequence (harm/benefit) of the suggested plan to centralise.To summarize:
In your body paragraphs you need to discuss the biggest flaws in the argument by
1. Stating the questionable assumption
2. Elaborate the weaknesses of the assumption
3. Show how this weakness the argument as a whole
4. If needed suggests ways in which this weakness could be amended.
That's about it.
Follow this and you should be able to score consistent near perfect scores!
Cheers,
Peo
Verbal Trainer - Crackverbal