In surveys, Mason City residents rank water sports (swimming, boating and fishing) among their favorite recreational activities. The Mason River flowing through the city is rarely used for these pursuits, however, and the city park department devotes little of its budget to maintaining riverside recr

In surveys, Mason City residents rank water sports (swimming, boating and fishing) among their favorite recreational activities. The Mason River flowing through the city is rarely used for these pursuits, however, and the city park department devotes little of its budget to maintaining riverside recreational facilities. For years there have been complaints from residents about the quality of the river’s water and the river’s smell. In response, the state has recently announced plans to clean up Mason River. Use of the river for water sports is therefore sure to increase. The city government should for that reason devote more money in this year’s budget to riverside recreational facilities.

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 the assumptions and what the implications are if the assumptions prove unwarranted.

While the quality of the water should be improved as soon as possible according to the author, some assumptions raised by the author are doubtable and thus the conclusions led by those assumptions are questionable as well.

In the passage the author suggests the government increase the input to maintain the riverside recreational facilities, implying that the government spent little funds on this project before, comparing to the total revenue of the government. But without the information of the revenue of this government, this judgment seems to be arbitrary. In case the local government is short of funds, and then the expense on cleaning the river takes a large part of the budget. They should not be blame since no more money can they spend on this project. Therefore, the final conclusion, increasing the budget, cannot hold under such condition.

Then the author believed cleaning up the river can directly improve the quality of the river. If it is by product of the human activity like rubbish or foul water, this method may solve the problem efficiently. Unfortunately, the author does not provide any clue about the origin of the pollution. Therefore the situation that the water may possibly be polluted at the upper stream of the river. The waste water and rotten rubbish float along the river and then gather at this town, diffusing unbearable smell. In this case, simply cleaning the rubbish in this limited area cannot take effect. Thus, the effort would be in vain as the state recently announced.

Last but not least, the author advised the government to devote money to riverside facilities. The author may presuppose that the riverside facilities strongly relate to the water quality of the river. So the conclusion can be reasoned from this hidden assumption. However, from empirical knowledge, this assumption can hardly be justified. For example, in China facilities along most rivers are just roads and pavements, which have little correlation with the river actually. Improvement on these facilities will only facilitate the experience of pedestrians other than the water quality. What will indeed improve the water quality is the effort to restrict the emission of waste water from factory. If the government spares no effort on confining the origin of water pollution, the condition of the Mason river will be alleviate a lot.