1. (1) When parents become old and destitute, the obligation of caring for them should be imposed on their children. (2) Clearly, children owe a debt to their parents. (3) Their parents brought them into the world and cared for them when they were unable to care for themselves. (4) This debt could be appropriately discharged by having grown children care for their parents.
2. (1) Defending the war on drugs may not be fashionable, but the fact remains that (2) hard-core drugs should remain illegal. (3) As long as hard-core drugs are illegal, they are harder to get, and (4) the social stigma of being arrested deters many users.
3. (1) The rain forest of Brazil produces oxygen for the whole world, yet (2) it yields no monetary return to that country. Given that (3) the industrialized nations consume the most oxygen, (4) those nations ought to pay Brazil an annual fee for the use of its rain forest.
The following arguments were abstracted from newspaper articles, editorials, and letters to the editor. Use the method presented in this section to construct argument patterns. If a statement is redundant or plays no role in the argument, do not include it in the pattern.