Public Health Official: The new occupational safety regulations implemented at the Apex Manufacturing plant have clearly been successful in making the facility a safer place to work. Despite the plant increasing its total manufacturing output by 30 percent this year, the annual number of reported workplace injuries has remained exactly the same as last year before the regulations took effect.
Statement: The public health official's argument depends on the assumption that the plant did not achieve its increase in output by heavily automating its processes and significantly reducing the size of its human workforce.
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Cevap
True
The proposed statement identifies a necessary 'defender' assumption. The argument relies on a flat absolute number (total injuries) to support a claim about a rate (workplace safety). For 'same total injuries' to mean 'safer', the underlying population of workers must not have significantly decreased. If the plant achieved its output by drastically cutting its human workforce through automation, then the same number of injuries occurred among far fewer workers, meaning the injury rate per worker skyrocketed. Because the argument completely collapses if we assume a severe workforce reduction occurred, the argument must implicitly assume that such a reduction did not occur.
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Defender Assumptions and the Numbers vs. Rates Flaw