Rate of Change of Distance
Date: 05/02/2002 at 21:01:32 From: sarah Subject: Definition of speed Hello Dr. Math, Speed is defined as the rate of change of distance moved with time. What is meant by "rate of change of distance"? Best regards.
Date: 05/03/2002 at 09:35:20 From: Doctor Ian Subject: Re: Definition of speed Hi Sarah, Distance is always defined with respect to some location. For example, wherever you are now, you are some distance from your refrigerator, some distance from the Sears Tower in Chicago, some distance from telephone pole number 4328748-11 in Doodle, Kansas, and so on. Now suppose you're standing at some marked location, like a phone booth. You start walking away from the phone booth. At any given instant, you are some distance from the phone booth, right? But at different instants, your distance is different, which means that your distance from the phone booth is _changing_ over time. Suppose you and a friend started walking away from the booth at the same time, but after 10 seconds, you've walked 20 feet, while your friend has walked 30 feet. Both of your distances from the phone booth are changing with time, but the changes aren't the same, and we'd like to have some way to compare them. That's where _rates_ come in. We would look at your progress, and say that since you've moved 20 feet in 10 seconds, on average your distance from the phone booth is changing by 2 feet every second. That is, if we know your distance at time T, then if we check it again at time T plus 1 second, we should expect the distance to have increased by 2 feet. But this is a pretty wordy description, and so we abbreviate it by saying that the _rate_ of change of your distance from the phone booth is 2 feet per second. And the rate of change of your friend's distance is 3 feet per second. Where this gets tricky is that things don't always move in a straight line. For example, suppose you walk in a square path, 20 feet start -----------> ^ | | | 20 feet | | | v <---------- and the trip takes you 40 seconds. At any given time, if we measure distance from where you were a moment ago, we would find that you were moving at 2 feet per second the whole time. That is, the rate of change of your distance FROM YOUR CURRENT POSITION was 2 feet per second. However, note that 40 seconds later, you're right back where you started. So the rate of change of your distance FROM YOUR STARTING POSITION was sometimes positive (when you were getting farther away from the starting position), and sometimes negative (when you were getting closer to the starting position); and on average, it was zero. In a situation like this, it becomes important to distinguish between velocity (which has a direction) and speed (which does not). We would say that your average SPEED was 2 feet per second, while your average VELOCITY was zero feet per second. Both of these are measures of the rate of change of your distance from somewhere; but they differ in where distance is being measured from. Does this help? - Doctor Ian, The Math Forum http://mathforum.org/dr.math/
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