Three sleds are being pulled horizontally on frictionless horizontal ice using horizontal ropes

(Fig. E5.14). The pull is of magnitude 190 N. Find (a) the acceleration of the system

Video transcript

Welcome back everybody. We have three boats here. Now, all these boats, our are identical And they are all identical because we are told that they have a mass of 20 mg each. Now all of these boats, two are connected by ropes and the entirety of the three boats are being pulled by some force that has a magnitude of 480 newtons. Our question is, what is the combined acceleration of all of these boats Before this experiment here, I'm actually going to think of all these boats as a single unit and for any single unit or object we know by Newton's second law that the force acting on it going to be the combined mass times the combined acceleration dividing both sides by mass here because I want to isolate our acceleration. We get that our acceleration is going to be equal to our force divided by mass, which we have these values. So let's go ahead and plug them in. Our combined acceleration is equal to our force of newtons divided by our combined mass. While we have three boats, we'll just do 20 times three. Which when you plug this into your calculator, we get that Our acceleration is eight m per second squared corresponding to our final answer choice of C. Thank you guys so much for watching. Hope you all enjoyed this video. We will see you all in the next one