we just did an practical on newton's second law and we just have to do a report on it.... basically there are two parts to it, first part is when the overall mass of the system remains constant and the second part is when the force remains constant.

there are two parts which i am uncertain about, they are the results table and the graphs.

for part one as the mass is constant do i just average out the acceleration and then use that to find force using F=MA?

Yes, generally that is the way to do it, because of the uncertainty of measursing acceleration.

so if my mass of the cart which was used was 0.24kg, and the mass hanger was 0.02kg, and average acceleration was 0.5734, then my force would be?

Force=m*a I assume your units for acceleration was in m/s^2

In the first part of your experiment, where the overall mass of the system remains constant, you can find the force by averaging out the acceleration and then using the equation F=ma, where F is the force, m is the mass, and a is the acceleration.

To create your results table, you will need to record the mass and corresponding acceleration for each trial. Once you have all the data, calculate the average acceleration by adding up all the acceleration values and dividing by the number of trials.

Next, you can use the average acceleration and the known mass to calculate the force for each trial using the formula F=ma. Simply multiply the average acceleration by the mass for each trial to find the force. Record these force values in your results table.

For the graphs, you will typically plot force (F) on the y-axis and mass (m) on the x-axis. Each data point on the graph will represent a specific trial, with the force value corresponding to the respective mass value. Connect the data points with a line to visualize the relationship between force and mass.

Remember to label your axes and provide a clear title for your graph. Additionally, you may want to include error bars or uncertainties on each data point to account for measurement errors.

I hope this helps! Let me know if you have any further questions.