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Inventors and Inventions

Eli Whitney

Eli Whitney
Reading Level
     edHelper's suggested reading level:   grades 7 to 8
     Flesch-Kincaid grade level:   7.74

Vocabulary
     challenging words:    gins, gunsmith, sieve, unskilled, production, slavery, brushes, power, assembly, government, trade, profit, fiber, patent, decade, mass
     content words:    Eli Whitney, Industrial Revolution

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Eli Whitney
By Mary L. Bushong 		  
1     Why should we study about Eli Whitney, the inventor of the cotton gin which is a really old machine that was invented a long time ago?
 
2     Eli Whitney's inventions, even though they seem simple by today's standards, changed the course of American history.
 
3     Eli was a native of Massachusetts, but after receiving his college degree from Yale at age 27, he traveled south to take a job on a plantation. There, he heard the planters talking about the problems of growing cotton. The main problem was that it was difficult to make a good profit from cotton, because the job of removing the cotton fiber from the seeds was so time consuming. It took a long day's work to separate just one pound of cotton from its seeds.

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