Question

A basketball is dropped from a walkway above Bartow Arena. It falls from rest with a constant acceleration of 9.8 m/s2 until it reaches the floor 3.1 seconds later. A physics class is modeling the 1-D straight line motion as part of a class project They want construct a simple, but accurate, data table using the following equations: vi+1 = vi + a t and xi+1 = xi + vi t which are familiar to you. Their instructor requires them to make the constant time interval\Delta t\:Δ t between rows in their table sufficiently small so that they have only a 3 percent error in the total distance traveled by the ball during the 3.1 seconds. What should be the value of \Delta t\:Δ t in their data table to cover the entire time interval and achieve the desired error?

Answer 1