Question

In an experiment to determine the acceleration due to gravity, one student holds a pencil at arms length and drop it. Another student starts a timer when the first student lets go and stops the timer when the pencil hits the ground. They repeat this several times and takes an average. Is this a valid experiment, why or why not? A. No, it is not valid because they are only dropping one item. B. No, it is not valid because taking the average will increase rounding error. C. No, it is not valid because the short distance means there will be a lot of error due to the students reaction time. D. Yes it is valid

Answer 1

Answer: C. No, it is not valid because the short distance means there will be a lot of error due to the student’s reaction time.

In this experiment, there may be error due to the student’s reaction time. Also, the distance was only at arm’s length throughout the experiment, which means that there was no difference or change in the distance. This also makes the experiment invalid.