cropped sensor

Imagine you have a scene where there's a person who's 20 feet from you. You have 2 cameras, one's film, and one's digital with a cropped sensor. You take the person's photo with the film camera using a 50mm lens, then take the same photo with the same lens, but using the digital camera with the cropped sensor. The resulting photos would show the person appearing closer in the photo taken with the digital camera.

(Note that you wouldn't actually have to take a picture to see the results. The size difference would be apparent through the viewfinder as well because on SLR cameras, what you see is what you get.)