Writer, Amartya Sen, in his essay, “More than 100 Million Missing Women”, recounts two reasons for the differences of the ratio of women to men in the Occident and the Orient. Two simplistic explanations are the East-Western culture and economic development. However, in the eighth paragraph, the author states that the East-Western culture diverges a flaw which cannot support the claim in the article as a whole: in Orient, the ratio of women to men is lower than this in Occident and Japan is strong evidence.
The content of the eighth paragraph is that the author gives evidence: the ratio of women to men in Japan is increasing for his readers to illustrate that using the East-Western culture to explain men are more than women is so superficial. In this paragraph, he means that people cannot support that in Asia, the population of women is always lower than the population of men. People cannot base on concept which “Western civilization is less sexist than Eastern” (Sen, 3) because this notion is so general and is not exact to some countries, like Japan.
In this paragraph, the author’s organization is well-ordered because after giving his topic sentence: “To take the cultural view first, the East-West explanation is obviously flawed because experiences within the East and Western diverge so sharply”, he gives evidence: Japan to support his claim. In Japan, by 1940, the population of women and men were not different. After 1940, the ratio of women and men is not similar because the population of women has been increasing. Therefore, in Japan the ratio of women to men is not the same with some countries in Asia. Thus, people cannot acknowledge that in Orient, the population of women is always lower than the population of men.
Many people can think that the author has a mistake when he shows this paragraph because it does not support his claim. However, when the author gives this paragraph, he does not want to rebut his claim in the whole of the essay; he really wants to make the readers have a perfect view to the differences of the ratio of women to men.
In short, in the eighth paragraph, the author makes his readers more clear about the East-Western explanation for the differences of the ratio of women to men when he gives a strong evidence: Japan.