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Right now you're sitting on a rapidly-spinning Earth. At this very moment you're hurtling around the axis of the Earth at roughly 750 miles per hour. Because of this, everything on Earth feels an apparent force called the Centrifugal Force that, if you turned off gravity, would cause us to fly off the spinning Earth into space! In fact, because of the centrifugal force, the Earth is slightly bulged at the equator and slightly flattened at the poles.
We are not capable of distinguishing between the Earth's gravity and centrifugal force. What you think of as the downward pull of gravity is actually the combination of gravity and the much weaker upward/sideward pull of the centrifugal force. "Down" is the direction that the two combined forces pull us, not quite directly toward the center of the Earth.
From now on, we'll keep gravity and the centrifugal force together, and just refer to the combination of them as "gravity".
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