Checkpoint 3, Motion Graphs Review
In 2019, Transport for NSW engineers used crash data recorder graphs to reconstruct that a vehicle was travelling at 98 km/h in a 60 zone, 8 seconds before impact.
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The hook described road safety engineers using crash data recorder graphs to reconstruct a vehicle's last moments, the same distance-time and speed-time graphs you've been practising.
After working through this checkpoint, how confident do you feel reading those graphs quickly and accurately? If you were the engineer, which feature of the graph would you look at first to understand what happened before the crash?
1. What does the gradient of a distance-time graph represent?
2. On a speed-time graph, a horizontal line means:
3. A car travels 240 km in 4 hours. What is its average speed?
4. What does the area under a speed-time graph represent?
5. A speed-time graph shows a straight line from (0, 0) to (4 s, 12 m/s). What is the acceleration?
6. Which of these is a vector quantity?
7. 36 km/h is equal to:
8. On a distance-time graph, a horizontal line means the object is:
9. A car accelerates from 10 m/s to 30 m/s in 5 seconds. What is its acceleration?
10. The formula for speed is:
A student walks 6 m in 3 seconds, stops for 2 seconds, then walks another 4 m in 2 seconds. Sketch a distance-time graph for this journey and calculate the average speed for the whole journey. (4 marks)
Hint: Total distance divided by total time gives average speed. Remember to include the time when the student is stationary.
A car accelerates uniformly from rest to 20 m/s in 5 seconds, travels at this speed for 10 seconds, then decelerates uniformly to rest in 5 seconds. Sketch the speed-time graph and calculate the total distance travelled. (4 marks)
Hint: Calculate the area under the graph. The shape consists of a triangle, a rectangle, and another triangle.