The Greatest Class On Earth

(I’m Sucking Up a Lot Here)

This Stuff in Real Life

Let’s say that you are on top of a building. You want to know how tall it is, but you don’t happen to have your meter meter with you. What do you do. You take the tennis ball that you have…You do have your tennis ball, don’t you…..and you drop it off of the building. Use your stopwatch to time how long it fell. Repeat this several times, and you’ll soon be able to see roughly how far it is from the point where you dropped the ball to the ground. How can you do this using time? It’s simple, just use the following equation.

Just plug in 0 for (Vo), and 9.8 m/s/s for (a) . For (t), enter your measured value. Now just carry through the mathematical operation, and you should be able to find how high you dropped the ball from. Take the average of all the heights to get the most reasonable height.

Let’s say that you run this execute this little task, and you get the following values.

Time of Fall (s)	Distance of fall (m)
2.14	22.4
2.22	24.1
2.32	26.3
2.35	27.0
2.41	28.4
2.44	29.1
2.51	30.8
2.52	31.1
2.52	31.1
2.64	34.1
2.68	35.1
2.7	35.7

The above data would yield the following graph:

Now you can take the average of the values for the drop distance, and you get the height to be 31.1 m.