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Argumentative Essay On Teenage Driving

Decent Essays

This argument analysis will be on the presentation from a woman whose nephew had been permanently injured to do a teenage driving accident. We watched in class called “Putting the Brakes on Teenage Driving”. The speaker provided a policy claim that the government should raise the legal age to drive in the United States. The speaker talks about how there are too many accidents that cause death or injury that involve teenage drivers. The speaker outlines 4 main arguments; inexperience, brain development, night driving, and teenage passengers. During the end of the analysis the speaker provides 3 possible solutions to implement in order to lower the number of accidents caused by teenage drivers.
The first claim the speaker makes is that teenage drivers are too inexperienced. The speaker presents one supporting piece of evidence. This evidence is that new drivers do not have enough behind the wheel training, which does not give them the opportunity to advance their driving skills. I believe that there is faulty in this argument because as stated by the speaker “there will always be inexperienced drivers, even if the driving age is 21 or even 25” (Unknown 42).
The second claim the speaker makes is that teenage brains are not fully developed. To back the claim the speaker provided two opinions from experts as evidence. The first comes from the National Institute of Mental Health suggests that “an average 16 year old brain has not developed to the point where he or she is able to effectively judge the risk of the situation. (Unknown 46). The second opinion comes a professor from the University of Colorado who performed a study that lasted 5 years that took traffic records of 16 year old drivers and compared them to records of drivers among the ages of 25 to 49. To conclude his study, he states “16 year old drivers displayed deliberate risk-taking, dangerous and aggressive driving behaviors (Unknown 52). I believe that this evidence provides helpful insight to the claim. However, this evidence may be skewed. Using the traffic records from the age group of 25 to 49 over a course of 5 years could overlap drivers since the drivers who were 25 in the first year of data may still contribute to the data 3 years later

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