72. A clothes wringer has a long handle. It wrings the clothes
drier than you can wring them by hand.
73. You use a crowbar when you want to raise a heavy object
such as a rock.
74. Sometimes it is almost impossible to get the top from a
jar of canned fruit unless you let a little air under the edge
of the lid.
75. It is much easier to carry a carpet sweeper if you take
hold near the sweeper part than it is if you take hold at the
end of the handle.
76. You can make marks on a paper by rubbing a pencil across
it.
77. A motorman sands the track when he wishes to stop the car
on a hill.
78. On a faucet there is a handle with which to turn it.
79. Before we pull candy we butter our fingers.
80. You can scratch glass with very hard steel but not with
wood.
SECTION 11. _Inertia._
Why is it that if you push a miniature auto rapidly, it will
go straight?
Why does the earth never stop moving?
When you jerk a piece of paper from under an inkwell, why does
the inkwell stay still?
When you are riding in a car and the car stops suddenly, you are
thrown forward; your body tends to keep moving in the direction in
which the car was going. When a car starts suddenly, you are thrown
backward; your body tends to stay where it was before the car started.
When an automobile bumps into anything, the people in the front seat
are often thrown forward through the wind shield and are badly cut;
their bodies keep on going in the direction in which the automobile
was going.
When you jump off a moving street car, you have to run along in the
direction the car was going or you fall down; your body tries to keep
going in the same direction it was moving, and if your feet do not
keep up, you topple forward.
Generally we think that it takes force to start things to move, but
that they will stop of their own accord. This is not true. It takes
just as much force to stop a thing as it does to start it, and what
usually does the stopping is friction.
When you shoot a stone in a sling shot, the contracting rubber pulls
the stone forward very rapidly. The stone has been started and
it would go on and never stop if nothing interfered with it. For
instance, if you should go away off in space--say halfway between here
and a star--and shoot a stone from a sling shot, that stone would keep
on going as fast as it was going when it left your sling shot, forever
and ever, without stopping, unless it bumped into a star or something.
On earth the reason it stops after a while is that it is bumping into
something all the time--into the particles of air while it is in the
air, and finally against the earth when it is pulled to the ground by
gravity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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