If light doesn't travel fast enough to escape a black hole - do things travelling into one exceed lightspeed?

Edward's answer is fairly close to the mark. Black holes warp spacetime so much that any particle that crosses the event horizon finds that simply moving forward in time also moves it toward the singularity at the centre of the black hole. The only way anything could escape the black hole would be if it could travel faster than light.

You can view an event horizon as being defined to be the boundary between an escape velocity that is lower than c and an escape velocity that has to be greater than c, as Edward indicated. To understand why light also experiences the warping of spacetime you can imagine a beam of light passing through a rocket with high acceleration. To the astronauts it would look as though the laser beam were travelling in a curve entering the rocket at the nose and leaving it at the tail.

As far as the astronauts are concerned the rocket could either be accelerating in free space or sitting on the launch pad on a massive body, they still feel a force pushing them into their seats. They conclude, therefore, that gravity can bend light, just as Edward indicated.

I'll take a swing at giving you a layman's terms explanation, but the words "general relativity" are going to have to be used. According the Einstein's theory of general relativity (you were warned), gravity causes a curvature of spacetime such that it does affect both mass and light/energy. For example, there's a phenomenon called gravitational lensing, in which light from a star that is directly behind a massive body from Earth's point of view can still be seen because the massive body's gravity bends the light around itself.

So light is affected by gravity. If you take the formula for gravitational escape velocity and plug in the speed of light, you get c^2=2*G*M/R. Hence, if the massive body has a radius R=2*G*M/(c^2) or smaller called the Schawzchild radius, even light cannot move fast enough to get out of the gravitational field.

And that's your black hole.

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.