If you experience weightlessness, this means that:
A. There is no net force acting on you.
B. You are accelerating upward.
C. Your apparent weight is zero.
The Correct Answer and Explanation is:
Correct Answer: C. Your apparent weight is zero.
Explanation:
Weightlessness refers to the sensation or condition in which a person or object experiences no apparent support force from a surface, resulting in what is commonly described as “zero gravity.” However, the term “weightlessness” can be misleading because gravitational force is almost always acting on you, even in space.
Your actual weight is the gravitational force acting on your mass, calculated using Newton’s Second Law:
Weight (W) = mass × gravitational acceleration (g).
This force always exists as long as you’re within a gravitational field (such as Earth’s).
What changes during weightlessness is your apparent weight — the force your body feels as support from the surface beneath you, like the normal force from a floor or a scale.
When you’re standing on the ground, the scale pushes up against your body with a force equal to your weight. But if you are in free fall — like in an elevator with broken cables, a roller coaster drop, or orbiting in space — both you and the surface beneath you are accelerating downward at the same rate due to gravity. There’s no normal force acting against your body. You’re not being supported by anything, and so you feel weightless.
In orbit, astronauts experience weightlessness not because there’s no gravity, but because they are in continuous free fall around the Earth. Their spacecraft and bodies fall together, producing no contact force, and hence apparent weight becomes zero.
Option A is incorrect because gravity is still acting — there is a net force causing the free-fall motion.
Option B is incorrect because accelerating upward increases apparent weight (like in a launch), not reduces it.
Thus, the best and most accurate answer is:
C. Your apparent weight is zero.
