Richard Gerber, age 9, of Rochester, N.Y., for his question:

How deep is the earth?

When you look far, far away to where the land meets the distant sky, the earth seems to be a flat table top. But imagine a tiny, tiny bug on a great big beach ball. If he looked around, he might think that his beach ball was also as flat as a table top. Our earth is actually a giant ball about 25,000 miles around the waist. When you stand on your little spot, it seems flat, but you can sail around it or fly around it. If you sank down, down through the ground  which, of course, can never happen  you would come to the center of the globe after about 2000 miles. If you went any deeper you would be rising up to the opposite side fo the globe. So the Earth is about 2000 miles deep.