ANS-14
Answers to Selected Exercises language—“generally acknowledged”—makes the
statement more opinion than fact. Qualifying the statement might bring it closer to a matter of fact:
“MIT is regarded among college presidents as the nation’s best school for engineering.” At least such
a claim could be verified.
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12.3
1. Rush Limbaugh is a radio-talk-show host and au-
thor who espouses a conservative point of view. His claim that condoms fail “around” 17 percent
of the time should be cautiously considered and verified with more-reliable sources. One key to
Limbaugh’s bias is his characterization of liberals in the first sentence of the quoted item. Could he
be charged here with a straw man fallacy?
4. The billboards proclaiming these “facts” are spon- sored by someone who is attempting to reduce
the level of immigration into the United States. The figures on the billboards may or may not be
correct, but anyone hoping to use them in an ar- gument would do well to corroborate the infor-
mation with other sources. A careful reader will notice the slippery language and less-than-reliable
information. In the first billboard, how little is “very little”? In the second, “arrive” is a vague
word with several possible meanings, including “visit.”
7. It may well be true that 67 percent of listeners “would prefer that the races be separated,” but that
doesn’t prove that “67 percent of people ” prefer the same. Are the callers to a radio talk show a repre-
sentative sample of “people” everywhere? Hardly. 10.
The Onion is an online parody newspaper that pub- lishes satirical articles about newsworthy events
and nonevents. Its intended audience—primarily regular readers who appreciate The Onions’ s biting
satire—won’t be misled by the passage. Given the patent implausibility of such an event, few others
will be either.
13. America The Book is a satirical romp through
American history written by Jon Stewart and the writers of Comedy Central’s fake news program,
The Daily Show . The passage is obviously a joke, but a pointed one given long-standing debates
about how disinterested the founding fathers’ motives were.
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12.4
1. Answers will vary. Here is one possibility: In her
book Starting Out Suburban: A Frosh Year Survival Guide, Linda Polland Puner suggests that most
freshmen find it difficult to be away from home for the first time. They miss some of the comforts,
such as good meals and privacy. Some are lucky enough, particularly if their family lives nearby,
to get home within the first month of school,
women in the general public who have connective tissue disease; the percentage of women with sili-
cone breast implants who have connective tissue disease; the percentage of women with saline breast
implants who have connective tissue disease.
7. Why do students choose to sit in the front row? 10. How do we define a “healthy heart”? Just red wine,
or other alcoholic beverages?
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11.11
1. Relative frequency. 4. Epistemic.
7. Relative frequency. 10. A priori.
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11.12
I. 1. Negative.
4. Negative.
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12.2
II. 1.
Facts: Cal Thomas worked for NBC News in the late 1960s. Robert Kitner was at one time presi-
dent of NBC, as was Sylvester Weaver, who went by the name of Pat. Matters of fact: Stories were
selected based on the audience they would attract this could be verified with interviews, for exam-
ple, or with corporate correspondence. Whether or not “ratings for news started to matter, as they
did for entertainment” could be verified in similar ways, though some words, such as mattered, would
need to be clarified. The decline in the ratings could easily be documented. But what about the
claim that “the respect most people once had for the journalism profession” also declined? Could
that be documented through surveys or opinion polls? Could such a statement be shown to be
factual?
4. Facts: Harvard is the oldest institution of higher
learning in America; thirty-three Nobel Prize winners graduated from Harvard; Bill Gates
developed the programming language BASIC; Radcliff was founded in 1879 and started admit-
ting men in 1973; Martin Luther King Jr. received a doctorate in theology from Boston University,
and so forth. Some statements, however, are not immediately verifiable. For example, it would be
very difficult to document the claim that MIT is “generally acknowledged to be the nation’s top
school for science and engineering.” The imprecise
Answers to Selected Exercises
ANS-15
novelist’s childhood experiences, including his father’s imprisonment for debt and Dickens’s sub-
sequent work in a shoe-polish factory, inf luenced his work as a novelist.” You would also need, of
course, to supply the appropriate reference infor- mation.
13. This is still being debated, so it would be best to tell your reader what source you are using.
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14 .9
1. f 4. k
7. j 10. c
13. n 16. u
19. w 22. s
25. b
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14 .10
III. 1. Weasel word.
4. Catchy slogan. 7. Humor.
10. Emotive words. 13. Sex appeal and humor.
16. Anxiety ad. 19. Catchy slogan.
22. Anxiety ad. 25. Sex appeal. Possible puffery and catchy slogan.
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15
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15.2
1. Not testable. Not realistically verifiable or falsifi- able, though scientific evidence no doubt bears on
the issue. 4. Not testable. Value statement.
7. Not testable. We can imagine evidence that would falsify the claim—superintelligent extraterrestrials
might visit the earth, for example—but the claim is not realistically verifiable because we have no way
to search the immensity of space. 10. Not realistically verifiable. Not only would tree-
counters have to resolve difficult borderline cases “Is this a tree or a bush?” “Is this scraggly-looking
but others must wait until Thanksgiving or even Christmas. Even just a semester away from home
can seem very long, and the distances can seem longer than they really are.
4. Answers will vary. Here is one possibility: In her article “A Test for Assessing Phonemic Aware-
ness in Young Children,” Hallie Kay Yopp claims that researchers have found that phonemic aware-
ness, or the ability to sound out words, is perhaps the single most important requirement for good
reading skills. This ability appears to be a more important indica
tor of reading success than IQ scores and vocabulary and listening comprehen-
sion tests. Having a proper assessment tool in place, therefore, can help direct the teacher to awareness
of potential problems and to the use of available exercises that will enable the student to acquire
stronger spelling and reading skills.
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12.5
1. Because rules are precise and must be followed to the letter, it would be best to quote the rule or
the relevant part of the rule exactly as it appears in the book. In claiming that a player should have
lost a tournament, someone might write, “In hit- ting the ball twice, Sampras clearly violated Rule
20d, which prohibits the player from ‘deliberately touch[ing] it [the ball] with his racket more than
once’ in a given point.” The writer would need, of course, to prove that the action was “deliberate.”
4. The passage could be paraphrased or summarized with some phrases quoted if necessary. The fol-
lowing sentence might appear in a student’s paper: “Athletes who push themselves to the limit often
incur injuries, but the medical community is now considering whether athletes who push too hard
might be susceptible to ‘a host of chronic diseases, even cancer’” Tabor.
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12.6
1. Fact available in wide variety of sources; does not need to be documented.
4. This fact should be documented. It is not widely known.
7. No need to document this fact; it is widely known and available.
10. This one is tricky. For scholars of Dickens’s life and work, this is a commonly known fact: Dickens’s
childhood experiences are indeed ref lected in sev- eral of his novels. Therefore, in preparing an argu-
ment for a literature class, you would most likely find this information in several sources and would
not have to cite it. However, you would not be in- correct in giving a source if you chose to do so. In
your paper you might write, “According to Charles Dickens’s friend and biographer, John Forster, the
ANS-16
Answers to Selected Exercises it worked”. The herbal tea might have worked
because of the placebo effect. Alternatively, the headache might have gone away by itself.
4. Pseudoscientific thinking. The arguer is explain- ing away falsifying evidence.
7. Pseudoscientific thinking. The graphologist is relying on general, Barnum-type language that
applies to practically everybody. 10. Pseudoscientific thinking. Parry is explaining
away falsifying data. 13. Pseudoscientific thinking. It’s not surprising that
dowsing sometimes works because underground water is abundant. The only way to know whether
dowsing consistently works, however, is to test it under controlled conditions.
tree alive or dead?”, but there is no way, even with an army of counters, that all living trees in
Canada could be located many are in remote loca- tions, growing in tall grasses, hidden under leaves,
etc.. And even if these obstacles could somehow be overcome, any ongoing count would be con-
tinually invalidated by the growth of new trees and the deaths of others. There are ways, however, in
which the claim might be reasonably falsified.
13. Not testable. If absolutely everything doubled in size—including all yardsticks and other standards
of measurement—there would be no way to detect the difference.
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15.3
1. Pseudoscientific thinking. The arguer relies on an appeal to personal experience “I tried it and
