Between a piece of paper and a rock, which will fall the fastest and why?
1 answer:
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Answer:
Explanation:
The horizontal distance covered by the ball in the falling is only determined by its horizontal motion - in fact, it is given by
where
is the horizontal velocity
t is the time of flight
The time of flight, instead, is only determined by the vertical motion of the ball: however, in this problem the vertical velocity is not changed (it is zero in both cases), so the time of flight remains the same.
In the first situation, the horizontal distance covered is
in the second case, the horizontal velocity is increased to
And so the new distance travelled will be
So, the distance increases linearly with the horizontal velocity.