Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Unit 3 Post - 6/21: Acceleration (Continued)

I took this video on the car ride home with my mom, it was late so at times its hard to see some of the detail. The video demonstrates many of the different concepts regarding velocity. In the beginning we increase our velocity and accelerate to a faster speed. Then we maintain that speed, so even though we were going 75 mph (hahaha) we had no acceleration. A car pulled in front of us and our exit approached, which meant it was time to slow down. This meant that we experienced negative acceleration, and a lower velocity. Then we came to a complete stop, not only did we have no acceleration (because we were maintaining our speed of 0 mph) but we had no velocity as well. It was a lot of fun!

Today, one of the biggest accomplishments in my understanding of physics and acceleration was units! Units are everything! Even if you don't completely understand the problem, you have a good chance of making something work if you just keep your units in tact. Understanding that acceleration is measured in m/s^2, time is measured in seconds, and distance in m will get you pretty far if you know what you're doing. The second thing  was understanding the differences between each type of graph and discovering ways to use the information it gives you efficiently. For example in a speed vs. time graph, if you want to find distance, you don't have to do some complicated formula - just find the area of the region below the curve of the specified section.

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