Here are the questions any
elementary school teacher should be able to answer: None of us should be so specialized that we can laugh off our ignorance in the basic tenets of life, culture, language, and mathematics.
- When we lose weight, where does most of it go?
- Why do we need oxygen?
- Why do things fall down?
- Why doesn't the sun burn up?
- Why does it get cold in the winter?
These are
not the right answers:
- Poop.
- To live (doesn't answer the question).
- "Gravity" doesn't answer the question--you may as well say vishquishnosity.
- Because it's really big.
- Because we're farther awa from the sun.
The world's a wonderfully strange place, a place where trees take our breath and spin it into sugar, and we take the sugar and break it back down back into water and CO
2, where all things made of stuff are attracted to all other things made of stuff, fueled by nuclear reactions in a local star unfathomably far away yet closer than the unfathomably large number of other stars that exist.
