Question

8. A car travels from Town A to Town B on one road at different speeds and stops at red lights. If you know the distance between the towns and the total time of the trip you can calculate the

Answer 1

Answer:

The velocity

Explanation:

The difference between speed and velocity is the following:

- Speed is defined as the ratio between the total distance covered by an object and the time taken:

$speed = \frac{distance}{time}$

and it is a scalar.

In this problem, we cannot calculate the speed of the car, because we don't know exactly what is the distance covered by the car (we only know the distance between town A and town B, but we don't know if the car has travelled on a straight path or not, so we don't know the distance it has covered)

- Velocity is defined as the ratio between the displacement and the time taken:

$velocity=\frac{displacement}{time}$

(note that velocity is a vector)

Displacement is the shortest distance (straight line) between the final and the initial point of the motion: in this case, it corresponds to the distance between town A and town B, which we know. Since we also know the time of the trip, this means that we can calculate the velocity of the car.