Fifth Grade
Worksheets
Pemberton's Drink
Coca-Cola Invented
Reading Comprehension for May 8
On a hot day, you crave something cold to drink. For many people, not just any drink will do. They want something fizzy. Something like Coca-Cola.
Coke might seem like a very modern drink, but it's not. It has actually been around for more than one hundred years. It was invented by a man named John Pemberton in Atlanta, Georgia. He worked in a drug store as a pharmacist.
In those days, there were no fast food restaurants. People went to diners, or they stopped at drug stores that had a soda fountain. There, they could sit at the counter or at a table and get drinks poured for them. Mr. Pemberton liked to invent new kinds of soda drinks, and he had already experienced some success with other drinks.
In 1886, he invented Coca-Cola. It got its name from the coca leaves (the source of cocaine) and kola nuts (caffeine) used in the recipe. People liked the taste of Coke, but he did not sell a lot. The first year, he lost money on it, but things soon improved. After five years, he sold the rights to the drink to Asa Candler for $2,300.
Candler got right to work. He found better ways to make more of the drink. He also began to advertise Coke. Until that time, only people around Atlanta knew about Coca-Cola. He wanted to change that. Soon he was running advertising campaigns for Coke all over the United States and Canada. The number of sales shot up. In ten years the business grew by 4,000 percent! The Coca-Cola Company was off to a great start.
