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eraemia
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Homework Statement
1. A person throws three identical rocks off a cliff of height h with exactly the same speed v0 each time. Rock A is thrown vertically upward, rock B is thrown straight out horizontally, and rock C is thrown straight downward. If we ignore the effects of air resistance, which rock hits the ground with the greatest speed?
a. Rock A
b. Rock B
c. Rock C
d. All rocks hit with the same speed.
2. Consider a ball interacting gravitationally with the earth. Imagine that we choose to define the interaction's potential energy to be zero if the ball is at ground level. A person standing at the bottom of a well throws the ball vertically upward from 20 m below the ground level. The ball makes it all the way up to 1 m below ground level before falling back into the well. The total energy of the ball-earth system is
a. Positive (in this particular case)
b. Positive (because total energy is always positive)
c. Zero
d. Negative
e. The answer depends on the rock's mass
f. Undefined
Homework Equations
The Attempt at a Solution
1. Is it (a), because rock a gets the most time for gravity to accelerate it? Or do all the rocks reach a terminal velocity (but is there terminal velocity without air friction?)?
2. I think that the answer is (d) Negative, because if V(z) = mgz and z < 0, then whatever the mass of the rock is, the potential energy would be zero. But if it asks for the TOTAL energy, do I also include its kinetic energy? In that case, would the TOTAL energy still be negative?
Thanks for the help guys. This forum has helped me a lot as I am taking an introductory physics class, which has a professor who doesn't teach and a textbook that doesn't explain (Six Ideas that Shaped Physics).