- #1
cFleming
- 4
- 0
Hello, I'm trying to teach myself basic physics from a book I bought at Davis-Kidd, and I've come across a problem which puzzles me to no end.
It's quite simple: It's a problem that uses a graph of a baseball player's change in velocity with time.
It labels 3 points of the graph and asks one question about each of them. My problem is with the very first question.
The baseball player's velocity is steadily increasing, and is represented as a diagonally upward line on a velocity/time graph.
At point A his velocity is 2 meters/second after one second. now they ask you what is his instantaneous acceleration at that point. I would say to find the instantaneous acceleration I need to find the slope of an imaginary line tangent to point A. The equation would be change in velocity/change in time as time approaches zero
How did the authors get 4 m/s in the numerator? and 2s in the denominator, for a final answer of +2 m/s.
Sorry for the wordiness. I just hope I'm not ridiculed for my stupidity. I really am interested in basic physics, it's just the nuts and bolts that I need to work on. I even took two college calculus classes, but that was long ago.
It's quite simple: It's a problem that uses a graph of a baseball player's change in velocity with time.
It labels 3 points of the graph and asks one question about each of them. My problem is with the very first question.
The baseball player's velocity is steadily increasing, and is represented as a diagonally upward line on a velocity/time graph.
At point A his velocity is 2 meters/second after one second. now they ask you what is his instantaneous acceleration at that point. I would say to find the instantaneous acceleration I need to find the slope of an imaginary line tangent to point A. The equation would be change in velocity/change in time as time approaches zero
How did the authors get 4 m/s in the numerator? and 2s in the denominator, for a final answer of +2 m/s.
Sorry for the wordiness. I just hope I'm not ridiculed for my stupidity. I really am interested in basic physics, it's just the nuts and bolts that I need to work on. I even took two college calculus classes, but that was long ago.