Abby Mengesha

Aditya Kumar

Alisha Mwanza

-Drunk drivers are involved in more than 50 percent of traffic deaths.

-hard evidence: The sentence includes a statistic to back up their claim.

-DNA tests of skin found under the victim’s fingernails suggest that the defendant was responsible for the assault.

-hard evidence/constructive evidence : DNA evidence has been found to prove that a person was responsible for a crime. You can’t argue with DNA results b/c it provides concrete evidence. But what if the victim and the defendant knew each other so that explains the DNA match or if they had an altercation that wasn’t the assault, then there needs to be other facts supporting this statement.

-A psychologist testified that teenage violence could not be blamed on video games.

-constructed argument: The sentence tries to establish credibility by stating that a psychologist was making the statement. But the psychologist doesn’t provide any statistics or facts so it can be their opinion.

-The crowds at President Trump’s inauguration were the largest on record.

-constructed argument: President Trump’s inauguration was actually not the largest on record, if you say pictures of the inauguration then you can see there were barley any people there compared to past presidents. So this is a biased statement.

-“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

-constructed argument: This is a generalized statement, there are no facts.

-Air bags ought to be removed from vehicles because they can kill young children and small-framed adults.

-constructed argument: This is a constructed argument because the author doesn’t provide any statistical data or evidence to back up their claim, so we cannot say that this has any hard facts.