George Kirk Jr., age 15, of Brownsville, Texas, for his question:

  IS THERE A DIFFERENCE BETWEEN TRAPSHOOTING AND SKEET?

     Both trapshooting and skeet, often called skeet shooting, are outdoor competitive sports in which participants fire shotguns at  targets catapulted into the air by mechanical devices.  The targets, called clay pigeons, are flipped into the air by spring driven mechanisms called traps. Skeet and trapshooting differ in certain important details, including the number of traps and shooting stations and types of shotgunfired.

     Clay pigeons measure no more than four and five sixteenths of  an inch in diameter and weigh about 3.5 ounces. They are brittle platters made from a mixture of clay and tar.  In trapshooting, all the targets are hurled from a single trap,  and 12 gauge shotguns are used. In skeet, two traps, located 40 yards apart, release the clay targets alternately or simultaneously along fixed, intersecting flight paths. A round of skeet consists of 25  shots. The standard skeet tournaments are 12 , 20 , 28 , and .410 gauge contests.

Trapshooting was developed in England late in the  18th century. The first targets were live pigeons which were released from cages known as traps. The sport was first practiced in the United States early in the 19th century.

 A scarcity of live pigeons prompted U.S. trapshooting enthusiasts  to create ingenious artificial targets. Among the first substitute targets were glass balls filled with feathers and solid iron pigeons  mounted on long metal rods. The platter shaped clay pigeons were developed about 1870.

In trapshooting, the clay target is hurled forward into the air away from the firing line, in a way to simulate the unpredictable flight patterns of birds taking wing. The targets are sprung out of  the traps at various angles and in various directions.

The clay pigeons rise to a minimum height of about  10 feet, and  unless hit, fall to the ground about 150 yards from the trap. Championsoften score hits on as many as 99 out of 100 targets. An early form of skeet was invented about 1915 by a group of Massachusetts hunting enthusiasts. To increase the variety of shooting  angles possible in trapshooting, the Massachusetts group began to fire at the clay targets from a series of 12 stations arranged in a circle 25 yards in diameter.

For a number of years, this new sport was known as round the clock shooting. About 1920 the shooting circle of skeet was reduced to a semicircle  and a second trap was added to provide additional firing angles. The sport grew rapidly and in 1926 a national magazine offered a prize for a suitable name. The winning name was "skeet," an old Scandinavian word meaning "shoot."

Skeet offers a greater variety of shooting angles than trapshooting. Most skeet competitions are decided on the basis of total hits  scored on 100 or more targets. Champions often score 100 hits out of as many tries.