SOLUTION: Pick two animals to be in a race and answer the following questions. a. Suppose two animals are in a race. Choose the two animals and calculate the speed of each animal in yards

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Question 433224: Pick two animals to be in a race and answer the following questions.
a. Suppose two animals are in a race. Choose the two animals and calculate the speed of each animal in yards per second. my answers:
Cheetah 70 mph
70 miles x 1 hour x 1760 yds = 34.2 yds/sec
1 hour 3600 sec 1 mile
Fox 42 Mph
42 miles x 1 hour x 1760 yds = 20.5 yds/sec
1 hour 3600 1 mile
b. Decide how much of a head start (in yards) the faster animal offers the slower animal. For each animal, write an equation relating distance from the starting line to time. (This is where I am having trouble.. these are my answers but they just doesn't seem right! I have to graph them and the graph seems weird.)
Fox 348.5y=20.5x
Cheetah y=34.2x

Answer by solver91311(24713) (Show Source):
You can put this solution on YOUR website!

You never shared the distance of the race (unless that is the unexplained factor of 348.5 in the equation for the fox). So, let's assume that the distance of the race is represented by and you have already assigned to represent the amount of elapsed time.

Given the above, the cheetah will take seconds to complete the race. If you want to create the situation where the two animals end the race in a tie if you give an appropriate head start to the fox, the two animals must run the same amount of time. But the cheetah will run yards and the fox will run yards, where is the head start. So the fox will take seconds to complete the race.

This gives us a proportion:

A little algebra gets us to:

Plug in the value of when you find it and do the arithmetic. By the way presuming is in yards, because a cheetah's speed drops off dramatically after a quarter mile.

John

My calculator said it, I believe it, that settles it