Mr.+White

Mr. W: I am going to put an example of a project here. My topic is hybrid cars. Specifically, I want to learn about the invention of the kind of car that can run on gasoline engine or electric motor, or a mix of power from both. Before I get started, I had better explain the term "hybrid." One dictionary, [] lists five definitions for "hybrid" as a noun, and four more ways to use "hybrid" as an adjective. If I say the Prius is a hybrid car, then i am using "hybrid" as an adjective to describe the noun "car." If I say that I drive a hybrid, then I am assuming that you know that the verb "to drive" refers to the action of piloting an automobile, and "hybrid" becomes a noun.

The definition of hybrid explains that two types of plants, such as a plum tree and an apricot tree can be cross-bred to create a new plant. Many people have a fear of hybrids, imagining that there is something dangerous about fooling around with nature. If you have ever enjoyed sweet corn on the cob, you have eaten a hybrid of different kinds of corn created to be an improved type of corn. Two types of animals, like a horse and a zebra can breed to create a "zorse". [] For a car, it means that the vehicle uses two types of energy. http://www.hybrids.cc/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/toyota_prius_photo.jpg Here is my Prius! Woo Hoo! 56 Miles per gallon! I love it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Prius The Prius gets better gas mileage than any other car sold in the US! The exhaust from it is very clean, too.It has been sold in Japan since 1997. By 2008, more than 1 million Prius cars had been sold in the world.

Step 1. Google "hybrid car" I see 17,300,000 hits, so I want to narrow it down a bit. using the search term "hybrid car invention" I found [] (side trip: here is a diagram of a 100 year old hybrid gas-electric car:) [] The hybrid car is not that new. This site says there was a patent for a hybrid car on March 2, 1909. A guy named Henri Pieper proposed a car with a combustion engine and a dynamo (electric generator). It may be that Pieper's idea never became hugelypopoular because only one year earlier, in 1908, Henry Ford's first assembly line opened. This let Ford sell cars much less expensively than his competitor's hand-made cars. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_line

http://www.howstuffworks.com/hybrid-car.htm

regular cars often get 20 to 30 LESS miles per gallon than hybrid cars.

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A mo-ped is a different kind of hybrid vehicle, or least it used to be. Early mo-peds were machines with **mo**tors attached to bicycles (which had to be **ped**aled to get going from a full stop, but which could maintain some speed with the motor power, even when the rider stopped pedaling. http://www.thefreedictionary.com/moped======