Mission KC5 Oil Drop Representations
Hold down the T key for 3 seconds to activate the audio accessibility mode, at which point you can click the K key to pause and resume audio. Useful for the Check Your Understanding and See Answers.
An old car has a leaky engine and leaves the following oil drop trace on the street; the drops hit the street at regular time intervals. The oil drop pattern depicts ____.
An object that moves with a constant velocity is moving with a constant speed in an unchanging direction. The distance traveled in each consecutive second is the same. An object that has an accelerated motion is changing its velocity. It could be speeding up, slowing down or changing direction. If the object is slowing down, then the amount of distance traveled in each second is decreasing. If the object is speeding up, it is covering a greater distance in each consecutive second.
The oil drop pattern uses dots to represent the location of the car after a certain interval of time - perhaps after every 1-second interval in time. An inspection of the location of each dot relative to the previous dots allows you to determine if the distance traveled in the most recent second is increasing, decreasing or staying the same. You can decide what type of motion is involved by observing how the distance traveled in each consecutive second is changing.
