yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Interpreting direction of motion from velocity-time graph | AP Calculus AB | Khan Academy


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

An object is moving along a line. The following graph gives the object's velocity over time. For each point on the graph, is the object moving forward, backward, or neither? So pause this video and see if you can figure that out.

All right, now let's do this together. We can see these different points on this velocity versus time graph. The important thing to realize is that if the velocity is positive, we're moving forward. If the velocity is negative, we're moving backward. If the velocity is zero, we're not moving either forward nor backward, or neither forward nor backward.

So right over here, we see that our velocity is positive—it's a positive two meters per second. So that means that we are moving forward. Now, over here, our velocity is zero meters per second, so this is neither. Now, over here, our velocity is negative four meters per second. One way to think about it is we're moving four meters per second backward, so I'll write backward.

Now, this is interesting, this last point, because you might be tempted to say, "All right, I'm oscillating. I'm going up, then I'm going down, then I'm going back up; maybe I'm moving forward here." But remember what we're thinking about here: this isn't position versus time; this is velocity versus time. So if our velocity is negative, we're moving backward.

And here, our velocity is still negative—it's becoming less negative, but it's still negative. So we are still moving; we are still moving backward. If we were at this point right over here or at this point, then we would be moving forward if our velocity were positive.

More Articles

View All
The Scientific Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment | World History | Khan Academy
As we get into the 1500s, the Renaissance has been going on for roughly 200 years. Especially, Europe has been rediscovering the knowledge from the Greeks and from the Romans. As they enter into the 16th century, they start to go beyond the knowledge of t…
Michael Burry: The next huge crash is coming soon | This is his stock portfolio
Michael Burry hasn’t been shy about saying that the stock market is extremely overvalued and on the brink of collapse. This is the same investor who became a legend by accurately predicting and betting on a different crash: the crash of the U.S. housing m…
New Discovery: Blood-Red Worms That Thrive in a Toxic Cave (EXCLUSIVE VIDEO) | National Geographic
These worms are small. They’re red, blood red, and they occur in well knots of worms—lots of worms together. Finding the worms in a place like sulfur cave shows that there are even places on Earth where creatures can live, where they are not connected to …
Being Ethical Is Long-term Greedy
In one of your tweets, you listed out some of the things you should study, like programming, sales, reading, writing, and arithmetic. One of the items that ended up on the cutting room floor was that you should also study ethics. I was originally going to…
How To Make A Living With NO "Job" | The Morning Toast Podcast
[Music] Can you tell us you brought us a gift. You set up this entire little moment. What is going on here? Well, today is a very special day in New York and I haven’t been to New York for over a year because of the whole COVID thing. But today my wine c…
Dian's Active Conservation | Dian Fossey: Secrets in the Mist
[music playing] WOMAN 1: For her time, Dian was very exceptional. Women wanted to get married and have kids. Setting up Karisoke, and studying the gorillas, and living that whole kind of life was completely not how she was brought up. She was not raised …