The spinning world
You may think our world, the earth, is standing still. But it isn’t. The
earth is spinning around and around, like a huge top.
Push a stick through a ball of clay and then twirl the stick. The clay
ball will turn around like a wheel. That’s how the earth spins—around
a kind of imaginary axle that runs through its middle. This imaginary
axle is called the axis. One end of the axis is the North Pole and the
other end is the South Pole.
Why can’t we feel the earth turn? Because we’re so tiny and it’s so big.
But we know it does turn because that’s what gives us our day and night.
In the morning, when the sky is bright, we know that our part of the
earth is turned toward the sun. In the evening, when the sky grows dark,
we know that we’ve turned away from the sun.
The time it takes the earth to make one complete turn is just a little
less than 24 hours—one full day and night.
