Exercise for writers (F):
Address each of the four following critical thinking areas to the statements listed below (B-F)
(I have already completed (A) so you can use it as a reference)
1. Find the conclusion- try to summarize it short enough so a person driving 65mph could read it on a billboard.
2. Establish the premise-
3. Distinguish between fact, opinion, & reasoned (using both fact & opinion) arguments by evaluating its validity
Validity/Truth of a statement can be made by:
Personal experience, reference of an established authority on subject, internal consistency, plus consistence on facts we already know as true.
4. Distinguish faulty reasoning- which is in every one of the statements!
Please answer #1-4 (listed above) for the each of the following quotes:
F. “But people talk about cap and tax and they aren’t sure exactly what we’re talking about. Let’s get back to step one. What is the problem? Why do we have to have this tax in the first place? It’s about carbon dioxide. Well, what is carbon dioxide? Let’s just go to a fundamental question. Carbon dioxide, Mister Speaker, is a natural byproduct of nature. Carbon dioxide is natural. It occurs in Earth. It is a part of the regular lifecycle of Earth. In fact, life on planet Earth can’t even exist without carbon dioxide. So necessary is it to human life, to animal life, to plant life, to the oceans, to the vegetation that’s on the Earth, to the, to the fowl that — that flies in the air, we need to have carbon dioxide as part of the fundamental lifecycle of Earth. As a matter of fact, carbon dioxide is portrayed as harmful! But there isn’t even one study that can be produced that shows carbon dioxide is a harmful gas. There isn’t one such study because carbon dioxide is not a harmful gas, it is a harmless gas. Carbon dioxide is natural. It is not harmful. It is part of Earth’s life cycle. And yet we’re being told that we have to reduce this natural substance and reduce the American standard of living to create an arbitrary reduction in something that is naturally occurring in the earth. Well we’re told the crux of this problem is human activity. It’s humans that are creating more carbon dioxide! Is that true, or is that false? Well, carbon dioxide is a natural part of Earth’s atmosphere. The carbon dioxide is perhaps three percent of the total atmosphere that’s in the Earth. So if you take a pie chart, and you have all of Earth’s atmosphere, carbon dioxide is perhaps three percent of that total. What part of human activity creates carbon dioxide? If carbon dioxide is a negligible gas and it’s only three percent of Earth’s atmosphere, what part is human activity? Human activity contributes perhaps three
percent of the three percent. In other words, human activity is maybe 3 percent
contributing to the 3 percent of carbon dioxide that’s in Earth’s atmosphere. It’s so
negligible — it’s a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent — that it can hardly
be — be quantified.” (Spoken on the House floor on Earth Day, April 22, 2009, by Rep. Michele Bachmann)
