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GRE Exam
The following appeared in a memo from the president of Bower Builders, a company that constructs new homes.
"A nationwide survey reveals that the two most-desired home features are a large family room and a large, well-appointed kitchen. A number of homes in our area built by our competitor Domus Construction have such features and have sold much faster and at significantly higher prices than the national average. To boost sales and profits, we should increase the size of the family rooms and kitchens in all the homes we build and should make state-of-the-art kitchens a standard feature. Moreover, our larger family rooms and kitchens can come at the expense of the dining room, since many of our recent buyers say they do not need a separate dining room for family meals."
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 these assumptions and what the implications are for the argument if the assumptions prove unwarranted.
Even the most complex models used in fishery management are cartoons of reality. They reduce hundreds of links in food webs to a handful and inadequately represent processes operating over space. Many of their assumptions are as flawed today as those of the simplest models of the past. Fish stocks, for one. are still assumed to be populations of a species that are isolated from one another. Yet many populations mix at their edges and some even migrate through areas occupied by other populations. Furthermore, the more complex models suffer from a "crisis of complexity"—more is really less. Adding layers of detail, each carrying its own set of assumptions, produces instability. The model's behavior becomes erratic, and conclusions drawn from it can be downright misleading.
In the context of the passage, the highlighted portion serves to