More Unit 8!

Today we did learned more about work and energy and did a little lab on power. Power is the rate at which work is done and is expressed as Power = Work / Time.

This picture is kind of blurry but it's from Itsukushima (Miyajima) Island near Hiroshima, Japan. We were late for our ferry to get to Hiroshima so the guy from the hotel raced us down this steep and winding hill. I thought this was a good example because at the hotel which was on top of the hill we had potential energy and no kinetic energy since we weren't moving. Then when we starting going down the hill we lost potential energy and gained kinetic energy. If I wanted to find out the amount of work the car did I would use the equation, work = force x distance, and since force = mass x acceleration, you would just have to multiply mass by acceleration then multiply that answer by the total distance to find the total amount of work the car did. Then if I wanted to find out how much power was being done by the car I would divide the cars work by the time it took to get down the hill.