Verdict+Terry

• concise 250-300 words (word count excludes quoted material) • states clearly why Position 1 or Position 2 ‘won’ the trial • use at least one piece of textual support that was key to the winning argument

Was the following statement PROVED OR DISPROVED in the trial? “The world and everything in it is unplanned accident, existence is meaningless; the past is irrelevant; nothing matters.”

I believe that Position 2 had scarcely won the debate. This is because they had a slight unfair advantage as well as a better group cooperation. This is because they seemed to have answered their questions given by their lawyers quite strongly. Like my group, had sometimes had some miscommunication, which led us to not being able make extremely strong points and get the whole message that we wanted to get through. Sometimes we had even contradicted our own group (this is the same for the other group too) by weakening our argument and unconsciously supporting position two. They had this small advantage in the ability to cross examine for a longer period of time allowing them to attack us where many of us did just break down not knowing how to answer the questions. I think they could've done better in pointing out our false or weak statements and attacking them, but did a fairly good job in repeating their argument and finding one strong point that helps support them. A strong point that I think was very strong was that someone stated that the dragon had said "they don't find meaning to life" or something. I think the thing that was the most strongly disproved was the fact that life is not meaningless. This is because they had attacked the dragon quite well about this topic about what he was stating. Many other their witnesses were very prepared it seems to answer any question that was thrown at them. So in the end I think it was their preparation for the debate that made the difference because I don't they really delivered the information that well.