Question

While strolling downtown on a saturday afternoon, you stumble across an old car show. as you are walking along an alley toward a main street, you glimpse a particularly stylish alpha romeo pass by. tall buildings on either side of the alley obscure your view, so you see the car only as it passes between the buildings. thinking back to your physics class, you realize that you can calculate the car's acceleration. you estimate the width of the alleyway between the two buildings to be 3 m. the car was in view for 0.2 s. you also heard the engine rev when the car started from a red light, so you know the alpha romeo started from rest 3 s before you first saw it. find the magnitude of its acceleration?

Answer 1

The speed of the car during the 0.2 second interval is 

Vf = d/t = 3m/0.2s = 15 m/s

It took the car (3 + 0.2) seconds to reach that speed. (Initially at rest)

Vf = Vo +a*t

Vo is the initial speed (Vo = 0)

Vf is the speed of the car at any given time

a is the acceleration

So,

a = Vf/t = 15m/s /(3.2 s) = 4.687 m/s^2