. A student wanted to investigate changing the mass of a cart that you can push. The student pushed both carts with a force of 200 Newtons. If one cart has a mass of 100kg and the other cart a mass of 50kg, what results would the student expect to see as far as how fast each cart moved in comparison with one another?
According to Newton's second law of motion, the acceleration of an object is directly proportional to the net force acting on it and inversely proportional to its mass. Mathematically, this can be written as:
acceleration = net force / mass
In this case, the net force acting on both carts is 200 Newtons, and the two carts have masses of 100kg and 50kg. Plugging these values into the equation, we can calculate the acceleration of each cart:
Acceleration of 100kg cart = 200 Newtons / 100kg = 2 m/s²
Acceleration of 50kg cart = 200 Newtons / 50kg = 4 m/s²
The acceleration is a measure of how fast an object's speed changes over time. So, the student would expect to see that the cart with a mass of 50kg accelerates at a faster rate (4 m/s²) compared to the cart with a mass of 100kg (2 m/s²). This means that the 50kg cart would move faster than the 100kg cart.