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t in their studies at entrance, sixty-two per cent during the first two years, and seven per cent of failure. The nonsmokers got ninety-one per cent in their entrance examinations and sixty-nine per cent in their first two years in college, while only four per cent were failures. In this respect Dr. Meylan thinks there is a distinct relation between smoking and scholarship. Of the same set of students forty-seven per cent of the smokers won places on varsity athletic teams, while only thirty-seven per cent of the nonsmokers could get places. If the next to the last sentence had read, "Smoking therefore seems to be a cause of low scholarship," what should you think of the reasoning? 30. Criticize the reasoning in the following portion of an argument for prohibition: Dr. Williams says, "We find no evidence that the prohibition laws have in the past been effective in diminishing the consumption of alcoholic beverages." ... The absence of logic in Dr. Williams's conclusion will be readily seen by substituting the homicide evil and the greed evil for the liquor evil in his argument. Since its establishment the United States has sought to remedy with prohibition the homicide evil. Every state has laws with severe penalties prohibiting murder. And yet the number of homicides in the United States has steadily increased until the number in 1910 was eight thousand nine hundred and seventy-five. Since, then, homicides have steadily increased during the past hundred years under a law with severe penalties prohibiting them, a prohibitory law has not been and cannot be a remedy for homicide. 31. Criticize the reasoning in the following extract from an argument for the electrification of the terminal part of a railroad: It is true that locomotive smoke and gas do not kill people outright; but that their influence though not immediately measurable is to shorten life cannot, I submit, be successfully combated.... A few years ago I made some calculations based on the records of ten years' operation of the railroads in this state, and found that if a man should spend his whole time day and night riding in railroad trains at an average rate of thirty miles an hour, and if he had average good luck, he would not be killed by accident, without his fault, oftener than once in fifteen hundred years, and that
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