You drop a soccer ball from your third-story balcony. Use the particle model to draw a motion diagram showing the ball’s position and average velocity vectors from the time you release the ball until the instant it touches the ground.
Solution:
Model
We model the ball’s motion from the instant after it is released, when it has zero velocity, to the instant before it hits the ground, when it will have its maximum velocity.
Solve
Assess
Notice that the “particle” we have drawn has a finite dimensions, so it appears as if the bottom half of this “particle” has penetrated into the ground in the bottom frame. This is not really the case; our mental particle has no size and is located at the tip of the velocity vector arrow.
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