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Chapter 2 - Exercise 4
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Making Accurate Inferences

For this exercise, you will be asked to locate the specific sentence that led you to your inference answers.

(1) The man who invented Coca-Cola was not a native Atlantan, but on the day of his funeral every drugstore in town testimonially shut up shop. (2) He was John Styth Pemberton, born in 1933 in Knoxville, Georgia, eighty miles away. (3) Sometimes known as Doctor, Pemberton was a pharmacist who, during the Civil War, led a cavalry troop under General Joe Wheeler. (4) He settled in Atlanta in 1969, and soon began brewing patent medicines as Triplex Liver Pills and Globe of Flower Cough Syrup. (5) In 1885, he registered a trademark for something called French Wine Coca--Ideal Nerve and Tonic Stimulant; a few months later he formed the Pemberton Chemical Company, and recruited the services of a bookkeeper named Frank M. Robinson, who not only had a good head for figures but, attached to it, so exceptional a nose that he could audit the composition of a batch of syrup merely by sniffing at it. (6) In 1886--a year in which, as contemporary Coca-Cola officials like to point out, Conan Doyle unveiled Sherlock Holmes and French unveiled the Statue of Liberty--Pemberton unveiled a syrup that he called Coca-Cola. (7) It was a modification of his French Wine Coca. (8) He had taken out the wine and added a pinch of caffeine, and, when the end product tasted awful, had thrown in some extract of cola (or kola) nut and a few other oils, blending the mixture in a three-legged iron pot in his back yard and swishing it around with an oar. (9) He distributed it to soda fountains in used beer bottles, and Robinson, with his flowing bookkeeper's script, presently devised a label, on which "Coca-Cola" was written in the fashion that is still employed. (10) Pemberton looked upon his concoction less as a refreshment than as a headache cure, especially for people whose throbbing temples could be traced to overindulgence. (11) On a morning late in 1886, one such victim of the night before dragged himself into an Atlanta drugstore and asked for a dollop of Coca-Cola. (12) Druggists customarily stirred a teaspoonful of syrup into a glass of water, but in this instance the factotum on duty was too lazy to walk to the fresh-water tap, a couple of feet off. (13) Instead, he mixed the syrup with some charged water, which was closer at hand. (14) The suffering customer perked up almost at once, and word quickly spread that the best Coca-Cola was a fizzy one.
--E. J. Kahn, The Big Drink

As before, label each inference as follows: PA (probably accurate); PI (probably inaccurate); or NP (not in the passage).

Then in the space below each question, locate the specific sentence-the evidence-- that helped you arrive at your answer if the inference is accurate. If the inference is not suggested in the passage, label the inference as NP and fill in a zero for the sentence number.

1


John Styth Pemberton, the man who invented Coca-Cola, was well respected in the Atlanta community.
Sentence
2


Pemberton was known as Doctor because he liked to dispense free medical advice to his customers.
Sentence
3


Pemberton's first patent medicines, Triplex Liver Pills and Globe of Flower cough syrup, were medically quite effective.
Sentence
4


Pemberton took out the wine and added a pinch of caffeine to make his syrup taste better.
Sentence
5


The original Coca-Cola syrup contained cocaine and was highly addictive.
Sentence
6


Pemberton measured all his ingredients carefully and prepared the syrup according to a precise formula.
Sentence
7


Pemberton recognized immediately that Coca-Cola, his new invention, would be used mostly as a refreshment.
Sentence
8


The invention of the carbonated Coca-Cola we drink today can be traced to a soda jerk's laziness.
Sentence







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