The Scientific Apple

One day while Newton was sitting in his garden under an apple-tree, he saw an apple fall to the ground. A great many people before him had seen an apple fall to the ground, but Newton was the first man to ask: “Why does an apple fall to the ground? What makes it fall? Why does it not go up into the sky?”

He thought the matter over for a long time. It took him many years to solve the problem. He made many experiments. At last a brilliant idea came to his mind.

He found out that the earth pulls all things towards its centre, and that this was the reason, why the apple had fallen towards the earth and not away from it. Newton also found that the sun attracts the earth and all the planets, and that each planet attracts other planets, just in the same way as the earth attracts apples.

Find and underline words in the text that mean the same as the following definitions. They are in the same order as they appear in the text.

The surface of the Earth. To move downwards from a higher position to a lower position. The space above the Earth.

A subject or situation that you have to think about or deal with. To find the correct answer to a problem or the explanation for something that is difficult to understand. The middle part of anything.

To see something you are looking for; to discover. Anything in the sky which, like the earth, goes round the sun.


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The Scientific Apple