- #1
yangxu
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Homework Statement
A car going 70km/h comes to a stop in 6 seconds, assume that the deceleration is constant, find the distance traveled using a graph; find the distance traveled using antiderivatives.
The Attempt at a Solution
If the deceleration is constant, I would assume that the slope (derivative) of the graph would also be constant, hence the graph should look like a straight line with a negative slope.
Converting 70km/h into m/s, I get 19.4m/s. To calculate the distance, I simply took the area under the curve, which is a triangle:
(19.4 x 6)/2 = 58.2m
But when I'm using antiderivatives to solve this, I get a different answer...
S(6) = intergral v(t)dt = 19.4 (6) = 116.4m
It seems like this answer is twice as much as the one when calculated using a graph, and I'm sure the graph should be the right answer... could someone please tell me which part did I do wrong?