Re: Please, can you rate my essay? GMAT on Friday
[#permalink]
02 Oct 2012, 03:15
Can someone rate my first AWA essay.
Prompt
Question Type: Essay
Read the statement and the instructions that follow it, and then make any notes that will help you plan your response. Begin typing your response in the box at the bottom of the screen. You have 30 minutes in which to complete the essay.
“Manned space flight is costly and dangerous. Moreover, the recent success of a series of unmanned space probes and satellites has demonstrated that a great deal of useful information can be gathered without the costs and risks associated with sending men and women into space. Therefore, we should invest our resources in unmanned space flight.”
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.
Response
"The argument presents a comparison between manned and unmanned flights and supports the usage of unmanned flights over manned flight in order to optimize resources and getting best out of limited resources in the field of space exploration. Whereas on the outset the argument seems to depict the right picture but exploring deep into the assumption and analyzing it should reveal that with the current state of technologies there are no substitute of manned space flights. In this argument i would like to question the underlined assumptions in the argument and the conclusion hence derived.
The conclusion of the argument is that and unmanned flight is better in terms of doing space exploration and research. The argument assumes three flawed assumptions. First assumption is that with today's technologies and near future developing technologies, the behaviors and outer atmosphere's effect can be replicated exactly while in space. This is clearly not the case today, of the 5 sensory argument in today's world man has been only able to develop sensory technologies related to listening, speaking and seeing whereas the taste or olfactory technologies are still some distance to go before the technology conquest can be achieved. More than this the technologies are still available with varying degree of inflexibilities built up in technology, hence to think that technology can completely replicate human behavior in the outer atmosphere in naive at best.
Secondly the ever changing environment while in flight can be controlled only with the special built inflexible robotic controls which creates a further risk on the control of such exploration flights. Granted that the cost of manned space flights is higher on account of additional spend on making the flights returnable to earth, however with space astronauts returning the earth can bring in quite a few other experiences such as overall effect of weightlessness, unseen electromagnetic fields and unknown elements of outer world, which can be utilized in years to come, whereas the unmanned flight is limited by the amount of data it sends as per pre-designed objectives and its parameters. Loss of life is a real danger but that can be reduced to great extent by few early unmanned flights, however the learning and experience can be best achieved only by flights when finally the man is present to experience the unknown of the outer space.
The unmanned flights can be a good source of information once we are able to develop technologies which can capture human sensory requirements and able to replicate the human attentiveness and ability to work in an unknown environment with much improved robotic machinery which can work better than human being with relatively less degree of redundancies and inflexibilities.
In the final analysis in my opinion the argument is flawed in assuming that all the human moves can be replicated by machines at present and hence can replace humans for outer space exploration with current state of technologies."