Motion and speed
Our world is one of movement everywhere you look something is moving
A car travelling along the road
A leaf blowing in the wind
A snail crawling on a wall
Your heart beating to keep you alive
Speed can be important - an ambulance taking an injured person to hospital
Speed can be fun - riding on a horse, in a fast car or a speedboat
Speed can be dangerous - speed limits on roads help to make them safer
Even as you read this you are travelling at an enormous speed because the Earth is orbiting the Sun at about 30 km/sec!
Some things move very fast such as a high
speed jet plane, others are very slow such as the growth of a plant. You may have seen
programmes on television where a film taken at high speed is played back slowly to show things
like a bullet breaking a light bulb, or speeded up to show clouds racing across the sky.
STUDENT INVESTIGATION 1
Find out the speed limits of the following:
(a) a car on a motorway in Britain
(b) a caravan on a motorway in Britain
(c) a car in a built up area in Britain
(d) a car on a motorway in France (i) in the dry (ii) in the wet
(e) a car in a built up area in France
STUDENT INVESTIGATION 2
Find out:
(a) the present land speed record
(b) the world record for the women’s 100m
(c) The fastest speed ever reached by a human
(e) The average speed for the fastest marathon run
(f) the wind speed in a force eight gale
A VERSION IN WORD IS AVAILABLE ON THE SCHOOLPHYSICS USB
