Speed and Acceleration Practice
PART 1: CONCEPTS
1. Does the speedometer of a car read average speed or instantaneous speed? How do you know?
2. Which two controls on a car cause a change in speed?
3. What is the acceleration of a car that travels in a straight line at a constant speed?
4. If we were to graph the above acceleration, what would the graph look like?
5. What is the acceleration of a car that is slowing down for a red light?
6. If we were to graph the above acceleration, what would the graph look like?
7. Explain to me how a car can be accelerating if it is moving at a constant speed (notice I did not say "velocity").
PART 2: PRACTICE Complete the following problems. Show all work and include units in your answer!
8. A roller coaster car rapidly picks up speed as it rolls down a slope. As it starts down the slope, its speed is 4 m/s.
But 3 seconds later, at the bottom of the slope, its speed is 22 m/s. What is its average acceleration?
9. A cyclist accelerates from 0 m/s to 8 m/s in 3 seconds. What is his acceleration?
10. Is this acceleration of the cyclist in the previous question higher than that of a car which accelerates from 0 to 30
m/s in 8 seconds?
11. A car advertisement states that a certain car can accelerate from rest to 50 mi/hr in 7 seconds. Find the car’s
average acceleration.
12. A lizard accelerates from 2 m/s to 10 m/s in 4 seconds. What is the lizard’s average acceleration?
13. A car travels 560 miles in 9.1 hours. What is its average speed?
14. If you are 16 miles from Charleston, how long will it take to get there if your average speed is 42 miles per hour?
15. If you ran at a rate of 300 m/min for 30 minutes, how far would you have run?
16. Find the average speed of a walk to school and back if you took 12 minutes to walk there and 18 minutes to walk
back. The school is 1.5 miles from home.
17. A ball rolling down a hill accelerates from 40.0 m/min to 60.0 m/min in a time period of 3.0 minutes. What is the
ball’s acceleration?
18. Imagine you are traveling to Chicago, and you pass a mile marker that says you have 191 miles to go. How long
will it take you to get to Chicago if your average speed for the rest of the trip is 66 mi/h?
19. A bicyclist is riding in a hilly area. She approaches a hill, and when she arrives at the bottom of the hill she is
traveling at a speed of 15.0 m/s. After 1.0 minutes, she arrives at the top of the hill, and her speed is now 7.0
m/s. What is her average acceleration in m/s2?
20. What is the acceleration of a car that can go from 0 to 60 mi/h in 6.0 seconds? Your answer should be in mi/h2.
21. What is the speed of a Iron Man when he travels 9000 meters in 12.12 seconds?
22. What is the speed of a jet plane that travels 528 meters in 4 seconds?
23. After an impact involving a non-functioning satellite, a paint chip leaves the surface of the satellite at a speed of
96 m/s. After 17 seconds, how far has the chip traveled?
24. How long will your trip take (in hours) if you travel 350 km at an average speed of 80 km/hr?
25. How many seconds will it take for a a pass thrown by Peyton Manning to travel 450 km at a rate of 120 m/s?
26. What is the speed of a walking person in m/s if the person travels 1000 m in 20 minutes?
27. How far (in meters) will you travel in 3 minutes running at a rate of 6 m/s?
28. In 0.5 seconds, a projectile goes from 0 to 300 m/s. What is the acceleration of the projectile?
29. A meteorite changed speed from 1.0 km/s to 0 km/s in 0.03 seconds when it crashed into my car. Not cool.
What is the acceleration of the meteorite?
30. The space shuttle releases a space telescope into orbit around the earth. The telescope goes from being
stationary to traveling at a speed of 1700 m/s in 25 seconds. What is the acceleration of the satellite?