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Applying The Laws Of Motion To Measure Speed And Acceleration

Running head: MEASURING SPEED AND ACCELERATION {text:bookmark-start} Acceleration In A Bottle: The Measurement of Speed and Acceleration {text:bookmark-end} Justin Xavier Green Signal Hill Elementary School Mrs. Shaw March 30, 2009 {text:bookmark-start} Table of Contents To redo the Table of Contents, click anywhere in the Table, and press F9. Delete this text after you redo your Table of Contents. Accelerometers work by using inertia. The water in an accelerometer resists motion, and moves away from the direction of acceleration. An accelerating accelerometer looks like this: In 1687, an English scientist by the name of Issac Newton came up with three laws of motion, which show how forces affect moving bodies. The first law states that an object at rest will stay at rest unless a force acts on it and an object moving at a constant speed in a straight line will continue at the same speed and in the same direction unless a force acts on it. The second law states that when a force acts on an object, the object changes its speed or direction of motion in the same direction as the force that has been applied. The greater the force acting on a body, the the greater the acceleration produced. The third law states that for every force, there is an equal force acting in the opposite direction. For example when a horse pulls a stone tied by a rope. The forward force acts on the stone, the horse feels an equal force and forces backward. {text:bookmark-start} Abstract {text:bookmark-end} Type your abstract here. Data Analysis In my experiment, the data that I collected was quite fascinating. During trial 1 of the experiment, at the time when the car wasn’t moving, the water line was a 0, but as the car’s speed increased to 40mph, the force pushed the water level to go up to ¼ inch on the scale. As we the car speed leveled off and maintained 40mph over a period of approx 10minutes, the water level line returned to 0. During trial 2, when the car wasn’t...