--- title: Why things fall: the apple and the pull of the Earth — a lesson of Mova's school · trees and pragmatics description: «Why things fall: the apple and the pull of the Earth», a lesson of the physics course of Mova's primary school, sentence by sentence with dependency trees and pragmatics. It begins: Everything that has mass pulls on everything else, and this pull is called gravity. --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/physics/1-why-things-fall/) [home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/) / [Physics](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/physics/) / Why things fall: the apple and the pul… # Why things fall: the apple and the pull of the Earth Lesson 1 of the physics course of Mova's primary school: 17 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: [the lesson at school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/school-run/physics/1-why-things-fall/). - [0](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/physics/1-why-things-fall/0/) — Everything that has mass pulls on everything else, and this pull is called gravity. - [1](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/physics/1-why-things-fall/1/) — The Earth is so huge that its pull is the one we feel: it tugs every apple, ball and child towards its middle. - [3](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/physics/1-why-things-fall/3/) — Drop a feather and a stone together and the stone wins, but not because it is heavier: the air pushes back on the fluffy feather much more. - [4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/physics/1-why-things-fall/4/) — On the Moon, where there is no air, an astronaut dropped a hammer and a feather, and they landed at exactly the same moment. - [5](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/physics/1-why-things-fall/5/) — The Earth pulls everything towards its middle, so "down" means towards the centre of the Earth wherever you stand. - [6](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/physics/1-why-things-fall/6/) — A falling apple speeds up all the way down because gravity keeps pulling it. - [7](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/physics/1-why-things-fall/7/) — The apple pulls the Earth too, but the Earth is so heavy that it moves far less than the width of an atom. - [8](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/physics/1-why-things-fall/8/) — A ball thrown straight up is pulled by gravity the whole time, even at the top where it seems to stop for a moment. - [10](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/physics/1-why-things-fall/10/) — The higher you jump from, the faster you are going when you land, and bending your knees makes the stop gentler. - [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/physics/1-why-things-fall/11/) — People in Australia do not fall off, because there is no real top or bottom to the Earth. - [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/physics/1-why-things-fall/12/) — Air pushes back on falling things, and it slows light, fluffy or flat things far more than heavy, compact ones. - [13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/physics/1-why-things-fall/13/) — A flat sheet of paper flutters down slowly, but the same sheet screwed into a ball drops fast, because only its shape changed. - [14](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/physics/1-why-things-fall/14/) — Without air, a heavy thing and a light thing fall at exactly the same speed: the heavy thing is pulled harder, but it is also harder to get moving, and the two cancel out. - [15](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/physics/1-why-things-fall/15/) — A sheet of paper laid flat on top of a book falls with the book, because the book shields it from the air. - [16](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/physics/1-why-things-fall/16/) — In 1971 the astronaut David Scott dropped a hammer and a falcon feather on the Moon, and they landed together. - [17](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/physics/1-why-things-fall/17/) — Galileo worked this out nearly 400 years earlier, with careful thinking and experiments with balls rolling down slopes. - [18](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/physics/1-why-things-fall/18/) — A raindrop speeds up until the push of the air equals its weight, and then it falls at a steady speed, so it does not hurt; without air, a drop from a high cloud would arrive faster than a racing car. - next →: [The Moon, the planets and the pull that holds them](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/physics/2-the-moon-the-planets-and-the-pull/) - ↑ back to [Physics](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/physics/)