Friday, November 6, 2009

Content-Displacement

Will


11/6/09

HB

                                                                  Displacement



Dear Granny,

                I got your letter today, and I would be happy to explain displacement to you! Displacement is actually very simple. Displacement is how far an object ends up from the starting point. Let’s say you are running in a race, which is 300 m long, and the start and finish is at the same point. You get to the end of the race, and you are all excited because you just covered 300 m. Well, you actually had a displacement of 0 m. Since you started and ended at the same point, you really on covered a distance of 0 m. Displacement is defined as a vector quantity that represents the net length of travel, accounting for direction! You might have been getting confused on what the difference is between distance and displacement. In case you are, the distance of an object tells you nothing about the direction of the travel, while displacement tells you precisely how far and in what direction. There are many ways to find the displacement. One way is simply to find the difference of where you started and where you finished (∆X=X2-X1). In a graph, you can find the displacement if you find the area under a velocity (m/s) versus Time (s) graph. If you have any more questions on displacement, feel free to write me back and I would be more than happy to answer your questions!

5 comments:

  1. this is really creative! i would just be careful about your sentence " Let’s say you are running in a race, which is 300 m long, and the start and finish is at the same point. You get to the end of the race, and you are all excited because you just covered 3 miles." Because 300 meters doesn't equal 3 miles but instead 0.18642 miles.

    ReplyDelete
  2. oh thanks you pippa, i made a change and forgot to change the other one, ill be sure to change it!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hey will it's Puja...I realized a mistake in your letter, it's not a very big one, but it's better to make sure everthing is right! In the sentence "In case you are, the distance of an object tell you nothing about the direction of the travel..." it should be "tells you nothing..." Also at the very beginning instead of saying "Displacement is the total amount of distance covered from your start to your finish" I would say that displacement is how far the object ends up from the starting point:)

    ReplyDelete
  4. Great comments! This is exactly what I meant about collaboration!

    ReplyDelete