Question 603726: How fast would a motorcycle weighing 500 lbs. be traveling to cover 500 feet in 5 seconds?
Answer by bucky(2189)   (Show Source):
You can put this solution on YOUR website! The way this problem is stated, the 500 lbs has nothing to do with what you are being asked to find ... namely how fast the motorcycle is going. You can find the speed of the motorcycle by just knowing how far it travels in some unit of time, and presumably you are to get it into some easily recognizable units.
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The problem says that the motorcycle travels 500 feet in 5 seconds. The means that each second it is going 100 ft, something you get by dividing the number of seconds (5) into the feet traveled in those 5 seconds (500). This gives you the speed in feet per second, or fps for short.
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So the speed or rate that the motorcycle is traveling is 100 ft per second.
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This means that in 60 seconds it goes 100 times 60 or 6000 ft. And since 60 seconds is a minute, it is going 6000 feet per minute (fpm).
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At 6000 feet in a minute, in 60 minutes it would go 60 times 6000 feet and this is 360,000 feet. But 60 minutes is an hour. So it goes 360,000 feet per hour. There are 5,280 feet in a mile, so when you divide the 360,000 feet by 5,280 feet in a mile you get that the motorcycle has gone 68.181818 miles in that hour or 68.181818 miles per hour (mph).
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You didn't say what units you wanted the speed to be expressed in. But since miles per hour (mph) is a common unit for vehicular speed, you can say that the motorcycle is traveling at 68.181818 mph.
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I hope this explanation helps you to understand that you can convert the speed from 500 feet in 5 seconds by dividing 5 into the time of five seconds and 5 into the 500 feet to convert the given speed to feet per second. Then multiply both time (a second) and the distance (100 feet) by 60 to convert the speed to 6000 feet per 60 seconds or 1 minute. Next multiply both the time (1 minute) and the distance in traveled in that minute (6000 ft) by 60 to get 60 minutes (1 hour) and 360,000 feet traveled in that hour. Then just divide the 360,000 feet by 5,280 feet per mile to convert it to 68.181818 miles that the motorcycle travels in an hour.
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A similar process could be done in several steps to convert the miles per hour to kilometers per hour which is another common measure of vehicular speed. A mile is equal to 1.6093 kilometers so if you multiply 68.181818 mph times 1.6093 kilometers you will find the speed in kilometers per hour (kph).
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