The use of ethanol as an additive in gasoline is really a bad idea. Ethanol is produced from corn, and when 40 percent of the annual corn crop is burned up in car engines, that obviously raises the price of corn for food. Also, adding ethanol to gasoline is highly inefficient. Ethanol yields about 30 percent less energy than gasoline, and it’s more expensive to transport and handle than gasoline.

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.