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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain: Sometimes, half a dozen figures will reveal, as with a lightning-flash,
the importance of a subject which ten thousand labored words,
with the same purpose in view, had left at last but dim and uncertain.
Here is a case of the sort--paragraph from the 'Cincinnati Commercial'-
'The towboat "Jos. B. Williams" is on her way to New Orleans with
a tow of thirty-two barges, containing six hundred thousand bushels
(seventy-six pounds to the bushel) of coal exclusive of her own fuel,
being the largest tow ever taken to New Orleans or anywhere else
in the world. Her freight bill, at 3 cents a bushel, amounts to
$18,000. It would take eighteen hundred cars, of three hundred and
thirty-three bushels to the car, to transport this amount of coal.
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