Question

A tennis player hits a ball at an angle of 50 degrees above horizontal so that it has an acceleration of 12 m/s2. What is the horizontal component of the acceleration?

Answer 1

So we want to know what is the magnitude of the horizontal component of acceleration ah if we know that the overall acceleration a=12 m/s^2 and the angle of overall acceleration and the horizontal acceleration is α=50°. We know that ah=a*cosα. So now it isn't hard to get the horizontal component: ah=12*cos50=12*0.64=7.71 m/s^2. So the correct answer is ah=7.71 m/s^2.