今天带着大家一起看一下如何应对指令Write a response in which you discuss one or more alternative explanations that could rival the proposed explanation and explain how your explanation(s) can plausibly account for the facts presented in the argument. 指令的核心是discuss one or more alternative explanations that could rival the proposed explanation。也就是说给出的文本中已经有了对于facts的proposed explanation，同时，文本作者的proposed explanation看来不是对于facts的解释，考生需要针对facts提出alternative explanations。并且，这些alternative explanations要要去rival （对抗于）proposed explanation，“对抗于”的意思是，alternative explanations还需要使得proposed explanation不合理。 接下来，我们看题： The following memorandum is from the business manager of Happy Pancake House restaurants. “Recently, butter has been replaced by margarine in Happy Pancake House restaurants throughout the southwestern United States. This change, however, has had little impact on our customers. In fact, only about 2 percent of customers have complained, indicating that an average of 98 people out of 100 are happy with the change. Furthermore, many servers have reported that a number of customers who ask for butter do not complain when they are given margarine instead. Clearly, either these customers do not distinguish butter from margarine or they use the term ‘butter’ to refer to either butter or margarine.” Write a response in which you discuss one or morealternative explanations that could rival the proposed explanation and explain how your explanation(s) can plausibly account for the facts presented in the argument. 我们就以个fact为例来分析和写作。个fact是“only about 2 percent of customers have complained”。针对这个fact，文本中的proposed explanation是“an average of 98 people out of 100 are happy with the change”。我们想到的alternative explanations有以下两个（但是可能不限于以下两个）： 1） The low rate of complaint may be the result of an inadequate pool of informants. 2） Among the 98 percent of customers, the dissatisfied ones chose not to complain for various reasons. 我们考虑一下是不是这两个情况是冲突与文本中的proposed explanation的？是的。于是，我们展开写作： The 2-percent may not be a pleasant case as it seems to be, because it may be attributed to a number of reasons other than what is proposed in the short passage. One alternative explanation for that low percentage is that the pool of informants is inadequate, since the restaurant’s survey may have been conducted within a rather limited length of time or the restaurant deliberately limit the number of customers who were asked to participate in the survey. Another counter-explanation may be that some of the unhappy customers chose not to complain for various reasons. They may think that it is not particularly necessary to complain despite their they are dissatisfaction with the replacement, or some of them may feel uncomfortable about the likely awkward situation that they need to express their discontent to the waiters. 我们仅以这个fact为例，写了一个段落，给大家演示破题、分析、写作的过程。针对别的fact以及别的proposed explanation是不是可以“照葫芦画瓢”？Sure。
