Monkey Business II
by Kevin J. Lin
Straight at the monkey.
Previously, the hunter, being a skilled marksman had trained through years of practice to always set his sites above the target. Why? Because bullets are influenced by gravity. In the absence of gravity, shooting would be much easier. You could always point straight at the target no matter how far away it is, the bullet would fly straight at it. But with gravity, the bullet's trajectory is a semi-ellipse.
When the monkey started to drop as soon as the gun was fired, the hunter just needed to abandon his training, because now the monkey and the bullet were both in free fall. Since gravity acted on both equally, they fell at the same rate.
Credit for this puzzle goes to an experiment done in my High School physics class, involving an air gun, an electromagnetic switch, and a "monkey" (actually a tin can with ears and eyes).
