Draft

When I was in high school, I got my first car. It was a 2003 Ford Explorer that my father passed down to me when I got my drivers license. It was not in the best shape, but it got me from where was to where I needed to go so I did not complain much. One day while I was sitting in the parking lot of a local pizza shop, smoke started billowing from under the hood of my car and a potent chemical smell filled the cabin. A light started flashing on the dashboard indicating that my engine needed to be checked. The temperature gauge on the dashboard went into the red zone, indicating that the engine temperature was getting too high. I turned off my engine and exited the drivers seat, only to find green liquid pouring out of my car onto the pavement. My inference was that a tube of some kind had broken off of where it was supposed to be attached. The car had a fair amount of rust on it, so I thought that the metal screws holding the tube in place could have rusted away over time and reached their breaking point. Sure enough, when I opened the hood of the car, there was the anti-freeze tube swinging freely and still pouring anti-freeze fluid out of the car. It was through the observations I made and then conveying them to my mechanic that he was able to fix my car so I could drive it again. I used my basic knowledge of a car engine to make inferences on what the problem could possibly be, and then used my observations to narrow down the possibilities. To fix the car, my mechanic relied on my initial observations of the problem, his secondary observations once the car was in his shop, and then his inferences to determine what steps he would take to fix the problem.