Inference Exercise
Explain the following:
41. There are no springs on the tops of high mountains.
42. People used to shake sand over their letters after writing them in ink.
43. People used to make night lights for bedrooms by pouring some oil into a cup of water and floating a piece of wick on the oil. The oil always stayed on top of the water, and went up through the wick fast enough to keep the light burning.
44. Your face becomes much dirtier when you are perspiring.
45. Ink bottles are usually made with wide bases.
46. When you spill water on the floor, you cannot wipe it up with wrapping paper, but you can dry it easily with a cloth.
47. Oiled mops are used in taking up dust.
48. Cake will stick to a pan unless the pan is greased.
49. Although the earth turns completely over every day, we never fall off it.
50. Signs are fastened sometimes to windows or to the wind shields of automobiles by little rubber "suction caps."
Section 8. The force that makes a thing hold together: Cohesion.
What makes rain fall in drops?
Why are diamonds hard?
You have not yet touched any of the most dangerous switches on the imaginary switchboard of universal laws. But if your experience in turning off the capillary attraction and adhesion switches did not discourage you, you might try turning off the one beside them labeled Cohesion:
Fig. 22. El Capitan, Yosemite Valley, California. If the force of cohesion were suspended, a mountain like this would immediately become the finest dust.
Things happen too swiftly for you to know much about them. The house you are in falls to dust instantly. You fall through the place where the floor has been; but you do not bump on the cement basement floor below, partly because there is no such thing as a hard floor or even hard ground anywhere, and partly because you disintegrate—fall to pieces—so completely that there is nothing left of you but a grayish film of fine dust and a haze of warm water.
With a deafening roar, rocks, skyscrapers, and even mountains tumble down, fall to pieces, and sink into an inconceivably fine dust. Nothing stands up in the world—not a tree, not an animal, not an island. With a wild rush the oceans flood in over the dust that has been nations and continents, and then this dust turns to a fine muddy ooze in the bottom of a worldwide sea.