Word: argumentative
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...main argument for the percentage policy is that it levels the socioeconomic playing field by giving hardworking students from underperforming secondary schools a chance to get a college education. Proponents of affirmative action, however, argue that this approach removes minority students from the top state universities. In California, for example, minority college enrollment has remained steady under the new system, but has tailed off at top schools, such as UC Berkeley and UCLA, and in the most competitive graduate programs. This phenomenon is known as "cascading" - dropping large chunks of minority populations down from top-tier to medium- and lower...
...council may have agreed with Darling and Marshall's wish to have administrators foot the bill for Census 2000, but it was more convinced by Orr's argument that the project was too important to possibly put in danger should funding from outside the council not be available...
HORGAN: Sure, scientists are keeping busy, but what are they actually accomplishing? My argument is that science in its grandest sense--the attempt to comprehend the universe and our place in it--has entered an era of diminishing returns. Scientists will continue making incremental advances, but they will never achieve their most ambitious goals, such as understanding the origin of the universe, of life and of human consciousness. Most people find this prediction hard to believe, because scientists and journalists breathlessly hype each new breakthrough, whether genuine or spurious, and ignore all the areas in which science makes little...
...guess where this argument is heading. During the Ice Ages, when our own species emerged, human populations were small and scattered and were continuously disrupted by climatic fluctuations. Conditions were ideal for genetic innovation. Today, however, the human population is 6 billion and mushrooming and increasingly densely distributed. At the same time, individual humans are incomparably more mobile than ever before. Efficient communication means that, for example, American males can advertise for wives in journals distributed halfway around the globe...
...immense universe contains gazillions of galaxies filled with appropriate stars and planets, and since life did emerge on the one and only planet we really know, how can we deny that a sizable proportion of these other planets must also contain life? Yet a logical fallacy dooms this common argument because either alternative can be reconciled with the positive result that I must obtain for the only place I can sample--our Earth. For if all appropriate planets generate some form of life, then I should not be surprised that I have found living things on my own world...