12. The conclusion of this argument is that advertising the reduced price of selected
items in the Daily Gazette will result in increased sales overall. To support it, the author
cites an informal poll conducted by sales clerks when customers purchased advertised
items. Each time one or more of the advertised items was sold, the clerks asked whether
the customer had read the ad. It turned out that two-thirds of 200 shoppers questioned
said that they had read the ad. In addition, of those who reported reading the ad, more
than half spent over $100 in the store. This argument is unconvincing for two reasons.
      To begin with, the author's line of reasoning is that the advertisement was the
cause of the purchase of the sale items. However, while the poll establishes a ion
between reading the ad and purchasing sale items, and also indicates a correlation,
though less significantly, between reading the ad and buying non-sale t does not
establish a general causal relationship between these events. To establish this
relationship, other factors that could bring about this result must be 'red and eliminated.
For example, if the four days during which the poll was conducted preceded
Thanksgiving and the advertised items were traditionally associated with this holiday,
then the results of the poll would be extremely biased and unreliable.
      Moreover, the author assumes that the poll indicates that advertising certain sale
will cause a general increase in sales. But the poll does not even address the issue of
increased overall sales; it informs us mainly that, of the people who purchased sales
items, more had read the ad than not. A much clearer indicator of the ad's effectiveness
would be a comparison of overall sales on days the ad ran with overall sales on
otherwise similar days when the ad did not run.
      In sum, this argument is defective mainly because the poll does not support the
conclusion that sales in general will increase when reduced-price products are
advertised in the Daily Gazette. To strengthen the argument, the author must, at the very
least, provide comparisons of overall sales reports as described above.