Question

A meter stick balances horizontally on a knife-edge at the 50.0 cm mark. With two 3.62 g coins stacked over the 20.3 cm mark, the stick is found to balance at the 22.5 cm mark. What is the mass of the meter stick

Answer 1

Answer:

0.5792g

Explanation:

The computation of the mass of the meter stick is shown below:

Let us assume the following items

x1 = 50 cm;

m2 = m3 = 3.62 g;

x2 = x3 = 20.3 cm;

xcm = 22.5 cm

Based on the above assumption, now we need to apply the equation of center mass which is given below:

$Xcm = \frac{m1x1 + m2x2 + m3x3}{m1 + m2 + m3} \\\\ 22.5 = \frac{m1\times 50 + 3.62 \times 20.3 + 3.62 \times 20.3}{m1 + 3.62 + 3.62}\\\\ 22.5m1 + 162.9 = 50m1 + 73.486 + 73.486$

27.5 m1 = 15.928

So, the m1  = 0.5792g