Question

1. How does inertia affect a person who is not wearing a seatbelt during a collision?

2. How does kinetic energy affect the stopping distance of a vehicle traveling at 30 mph compared to the same vehicle traveling at 60 mph?

3. How does kinetic energy affect the stopping distance of a small vehicle compared to a large vehicle?

4. Keeping in mind the kinetic energy of a moving vehicle, how can a driver best prepare to enter sharp curves in the roadway?

5. Using information about natural laws, explain why some car crashes produce minor injuries and others produce catastrophic injuries.

Imagine you are taking a road trip! Select a destination and navigate the trip. Answer the following questions in one or more complete sentences:

1. Where will you go on your trip?

2. You approach a railroad crossing with a crossbuck sign that has no lights or gates. What should you do?

3. You arrive at an intersection with traffic lights that are not working because of a power outage. What do you do?

4. There is a flashing yellow light at the intersection you are approaching. What does the flashing yellow light indicate, and what should you do to safely navigate this intersection?


5. On the road you are traveling, the pavement markings change from broken white lines to solid white lines between the lanes of traffic. What does the line change mean?

6. After an hour on the expressway, your passengers need to use the restroom and they want to get some food. As you approach the next exit, what color sign will you look for, and what type of information would you expect to see on that sign?

7. When you take the exit ramp off the expressway and merge onto the next road, you see yellow lines dividing the roadway. What do the yellow lines tell you about the traffic flow?

Answer 1

1) Inertia causes the person to keep going when the vehicle stops, so if you're not wearing a seatbelt you'll keep going until you hit something. Whether that be the seat ahead, the windshield, or the road.

2) It takes 4 times as long to stop a vehicle going twice the speed.

3) A large vehicle takes longer to stop because there's more mass and more kinetic energy there.

4) To prepare to enter sharp curves, a driver should slow down before turns