did it in exactly 30 min, my first try.
thanks for the help, sorry for the spelling mistakes...
The following appeared in a magazine article on trends and lifestyles.
"In general, people are not as concerned as they were a decade ago about regulating their intake of red meat and fatty cheeses. Walk into the Heart's Delight, a store that started selling organic fruits and vegetables and whole-grain flours in the 1960's, and you will also find a wide selection of cheeses made with high butterfat content. Next door, the owners of the Good Earth Caf�, an old vegetarian restaurant, are still making a modest living, but the owners of the new House of Beef across the street are millionaires."
Discuss how well reasoned you find this argument. In your discussion be sure to analyze the line of reasoning and the use of evidence in the argument. For example, you may need to consider what questionable assumptions underlie the thinking and what alternative explanations or counterexamples might weaken the conclusion. You can also discuss what sort of evidence would strengthen or refute the argument, what changes in the argument would make it more logically sound, and what, if anything, would help you better evaluate its conclusion.
The magazine's writer is making an assumption regarding the way peopole treat their red meat and fatty cheeses consumption, and trying to prove that people today are less aware than they were a decade ago to the effects of consuming such food. the argument is not based enough, and the examptions given are not strong enough.
first, we are given the example of the "Heart's Delight", a store that have been selling organic foods since the 1960's. the author mentions that you can also find "a wide selection of cheeses made with high butterfat content", and therefore we can understand that that's explains part of the decline in the awarness to a "healthy diet". the flaw in that assumption is that we can't tell from the info given weather those cheeses are sold in the store only in the last couple of years (or a decade, actually), or if it have been there ever since. other than that, we also don't know if that speceific kind of cheese is less or more healthy than other kinds. if i'd wanted to stregnthen that argument, i would have given an exmaple for an increase in the veriaty of fat cheeses being offered or sold in the store in the past ten years.
secondly, the author compares between two near restaurants, the "Good Earth Cafe" and the "new house of beef", mentioning that while the former makes a modest living, the latter became millionaires. That information is not enough for us to conclude from it that the reason is that people are less aware to the intake of red meat and fatty cheeses. We are not given any specificatin about the size of the dinning halls in the two places (which can make a great different between them), nor about the popularity rate of each one or the pricing level. giving us the mentioned information would have helped us to try and figure how well can this example be in helping to prove the argument.
to conclude, the argument is not storngly enough based, and the information provided is not solid enough to give us the right tools when we try to evaluate the argument's reasonning. I gave a couple of examples for possible ways to overcome the inside flaws in the part quoted from the article, that would have helped the reader to make a better judgment about how well the argument is based. the evidnce provided by the author are not enough for me to agree or disagree with the argument.