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Ch 02: Motion Along a Straight Line

Chapter 2, Problem 2

In an experiment, a shearwater (a seabird) was taken from its nest, flown 5150 km away, and released. The bird found its way back to its nest 13.5 days after release. If we place the origin at the nest and extend the +x–axis to the release point, what was the bird's average velocity in m/s (a) for the return flight

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Welcome back everybody. We are taking a look at a dog that has escaped from its cage and run all the way to the park. Now, I'm going to take this first trip being in the positive X direction. So he runs all the way to the park that is 8. km away, starting from zero km now. Now he then turns around and runs all the way back. Now the time it takes him to run, all the way back home is 25 minutes and we are tasked with finding what his average velocity was for his returning flight or returning run. Rather. Now for this, we have an equation that I've just written out here for average velocity, it's our final position minus our initial position all over time. Now remember since we're going back here, our final position is going to be the start in our initial position is going to be where the park was located. And when I say start where he started his entire trip, not just the return trip, but before using this equation, we need to make sure everything is in the correct unit. So let's go ahead and do that For our time. We're given in minutes, but we need it in seconds. So I'm gonna convert here. We know every one minute there is 60 seconds. So these units are going to cancel out and if you multiply straight across, we get that the time it took for him to get home was 1500 seconds. Now, our final position is still going to be zero m, zero kilometers translates to zero m. But what about our initial position? Well, our initial position we are given to be 8. kilometers and we need the meters. So in one kilometer there is 1000 m. If we multiply straight across, we get 8200 m. Now we are ready to go ahead and use this equation here to find our average velocity. This is equivalent to 0 -80, 200 all divided by 1500, giving us negative 5.47 m/s, which corresponds to answer choice B Thank you all so much for watching. Hope this video helped. We will see you well in the next one.