GRE Analyze an Argument Practice #1

"A recent study shows that people living on the continent of North America suffer 9 times more chronic fatigue and 31 times more chronic depression than do people living on the continent of Asia. Interestingly, Asians, on average, eat 20 grams of soy per day, whereas North Americans eat virtually none. It turns out that soy contains phytochemicals called isoflavones, which have been found to possess disease-preventing properties. Thus, North Americans should consider eating soy on a regular basis as a way of preventing fatigue and depression."

The notion that regular soy consumption prevents fatigue and depression appears at first glance to be an obvious conclusion. After all, soy does contain isoflavones which have been shown to possess disease-preventing properties. However, the author’s conclusion that North Americans would prevent fatigue and depression by eating soy regularly relies on assumptions which lack justification.

First of all, as mentioned in the argument, the people living on the continent of North America appear to suffer a great deal more chronic fatigue and chronic depression than the people living on the continent of Asia. The implicit assumption here is that the people living in North America are all of Caucasian ancestry, and the people living in Asia are all Asians. The converse could not be truer. Indeed, in this increasingly globalized world, there are many North Americans of Asian ancestries as well as Asians of Caucasian ancestry. The statistics quoted do not distinguish between these categories. Furthermore, it is known that North American Caucasians and Asians possess different susceptibilities to diseases due to their differing genetic make-ups. Are North American Caucasians more susceptible to chronic fatigue and chronic depression than North American Asians? This argument would be bolstered if the author makes it clear as to which ethnicities he/she is referring to.

The above argument is also weakened by the fact that it does not expand the results to include other people of Caucasian ancestry. The author does not include, for example, results of a similar study done on Europeans of Caucasian ancestry. A critical assumption here that the author hopes readers will overlook is that chronic fatigue and depression appear to be diseases endemic to North America and Asia only. In addition, the author neglects to give any absolute quantification on the level of chronic fatigue or depression suffered in both societies, making it difficult on the part of the reader to judge the efficacy of regular soy consumption.

Third, no indication is made as to how many people the study surveyed or if there were North American Caucasians who did not suffer from either chronic fatigue or depression despite not having consumed soy daily. The converse is also not shown – were there Asians who suffered from chronic fatigue and depression despite having eaten soy on a regular basis? There might be other factors involved in causing chronic fatigue and depression in North American society, such as increased stress, longer working hours, pollution, improper eating habits, or exposure to toxic chemicals in the environment.

Finally, although the author claims that soy contains isoflavones that prevent disease, no mention is made of what kind of diseases they prevent, nor is the mechanism through which they exert their effects elaborated on. Soy might very well exert its supposed health benefits through a placebo effect. In addition, the author does not consider if North American Caucasians regularly consume other foods that contain isoflavones as well. Thus, a dosage of 20 grams of soy per day for Asians might turn out to be unsuitable for North American Caucasians. Furthermore, no mention is made of the fact that regular soy consumption might cause as many health problems as it ameliorates. For example, overconsumption of soy can cause overproduction of uric acid and gout.

Following the argument that regular soy consumption could alleviate chronic fatigue and depression might prove beneficial for North Americans suffering from these problems. Before conclusions about eating soy regularly are reached, however, a more complete understanding of the benefits and drawbacks of soy consumption is needed. After all, a blind reliance on eating soy might prove as dangerous as not eating soy at all.

GRE Present Your Perspective Practice #2

"Academic disciplines have become so specialized in recent years that scholars' ideas reach only a narrow audience. Until scholars can reach a wider audience, their ideas will have little use."

In this era of rapid technological change where scholars have to deal with masses of information everyday, it is rather inevitable that academic specialization has become increasingly essential. Simply put, without specialization, scholars would find themselves bogged down in the Sargasso Sea of information overload. This specialization does not necessarily restrict the dissemination or use of scholarly ideas to just a select few that possess the academic background to understand the material, as an examination of the organization of modern academia will show.

To ensure survival of their ideas, scholars are trained from the very beginning to simplify and generalize. Whether explaining the significance of their research to lab visitors or presenting their research results to the public, scholars have to assume little or no academic background on the part of the audience. Effective communication is considered so important in academia that before being allowed into the vaunted ranks of scholars, one must first submit a written dissertation that is the culmination of original research conducted over several years.

Although the PhD degree arms a scholar with the tools to conduct original research, it does not supply one with the financial backing to do so. One of the fundamental requirements for conducting academic research – the research grant – requires that scholars possess the capability for effective communication. Because not all grant review committees possess sufficient knowledge to understand the details of the research, it is the responsibility of the scholar to communicate ideas in a comprehensible and succinct manner without losing track of their significance. In addition, in order to ensure industrial use of their research, scholars have to ensure that they are able to communicate their ideas to industry people.

Specialization in academia can be inherently dangerous if it overly narrows the foci through which scholars conduct their research. Publishers of scholarly journals understand this especially well. Hence, they periodically commission noted experts to write review articles – works that summarize and explain several years’ worth of research in their respective fields. Writers typically take pains to ensure that these review articles can be understood by a wider audience. Given the rather esoteric nature of certain research fields (e.g. quantum mechanics or pure mathematics), however, it is sometimes difficult to expect that even review articles in the field can be understood by an educated but uninformed audience. Enter the popular science journals. Journals such as Scientific American or Popular Science take the newest scientific discoveries and explain their significance without the scientific details. Even the most prestigious general academic journals – Science and Nature – routinely publish easily understood scientific journalism, only reserving the latter half of each journal issue for specialized research articles.

In conclusion, it is clear from the above examples that scholars are able to communicate their ideas to a wide audience, despite the specialized nature of their work. By allowing the public to appreciate the significance of their research, scholars ensure that their ideas are of use to society at large.

GRE Present Your Perspective Practice #1

"Originality does not mean thinking something that was never thought before; it means putting old ideas together in new ways."

It has been lamented before (no less by beginning graduate students who then go on to make seminal advances in their fields of research) that all the great discoveries have been made already, leaving us with nothing but to synthesize those discoveries in new ways that have not been explored. In the past, originality might have been synonymous with novelty. In this era of rapid social and technological change, however, original innovation calls for both approaches that are articulated in the essay prompt: novel ideas must be fused together with the results of previous research to give the best results.

Given the masses of knowledge and ideas that have originated throughout the millennia of mankind’s existence, coming up with something that was never thought about before appears to be near-impossible today. As one considers the type of cutting-edge research performed in laboratories around the world, however, the problem resolves itself at once. Our ancestors thought of things they could conceive of. While the ancient Greek philosophers speculated on the nature of the fundamental particle of matter (that we now know as an atom), it was unlikely that they would have predicted that an atom could be further subdivided into particles such as quarks. Although the results of his pea pod mating experiments led Mendel to believe that some fundamental unit of inheritance must be involved, given the seventeenth century technology of his time, it was unlikely that he thought about DNA, let alone the central dogma of molecular biology that explains the relationship between DNA and protein production. These two examples illustrate that coming up with something that has never been thought about before in our modern era is still possible.

Originality can also mean putting old ideas together in new ways. While Leonardo da Vinci designed the first helicopter, it took nearly five centuries before his concept could be physically realized. Although mankind has dreamed of controlled flight since antiquity, it was not until the Wright brothers invented the airplane in 1903 that that dream could be fulfilled.

On the other hand, no single approach alone can guarantee originality. While Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins saw a double helix in their x-ray crystallography data on DNA, it took the additional chemistry input of Francis Crick and James Watson to confirm the anti-parallel double-stranded helical form of DNA in a landmark paper published in Nature in the year 1953. Originality is not always born in a vacuum. As the saying attributed to Thomas Edison goes: “Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration,” those “bolts from the blue” that we often term as originality actually come from the many hours of passive absorbing, retaining and synthesizing of connections between seemingly unrelated pieces of information.

Perhaps the nature of originality can best be studied by looking at the way in which beginning graduate students search for their dissertation topic. One PhD guidebook summarized this process (and I paraphrase): “Take a block of research that has already been done and chisel another angle to it.” In our era, it is still possible to come up with novel ideas. However, it is certainly much easier to put together old ideas in a novel way for the sake of originality. This surely counts as thinking something that has never been thought before: after all, who ever thought of putting those old ideas together in the first place?