Have you ever been on or seen a ride like this at a fair or amusement park? Imagine being strapped into your seat at the bottom
of this 350-foot tower, with your feet dangling just above the ground. You make the trip up the tower at a steady rate of 20 feet per second, stop at the top of the tower to hang for a few seconds, then suddenly drop in a free fall for 288 feet! The trip up the tower is a linear relationship. The height of the riders, h, is equal to the constant rate multiplied by the time, t, since they began the trip up. The free fall down the tower is a quadratic relationship. The distance from the top to the bottom of the free fall, d, is modeled by this equation, where t is the time since the free fall began and is the initial distance above the bottom of the free fall.
