Question

A 365-kg car traveling horizontally at 21.1 m/sec slams into a tree and comes to a halt in 0.22 seconds. What force did the tree exert on the car to stop it?



please show work

Answer 1

Explanation:

Remember Newton's Second law

$F = ma$

We can use this to solve for the force exerted by the tree on the car when it stops the car.

We aren't given the acceleration directly in the problem statement, but we can solve for acceleration.

Recall that acceleration is the change is velocity per unit time. $a = \frac{\Delta v}{\Delta t}$

We know the original velocity as 21.1 m/s and the final velocity as 0.0 m/s. The time that it takes to stop the car is 0.22 seconds.

Now we can solve using the equation. $F = \frac{21.1 - 0.0}{0.22} * 365$