Question

A suspect is leading the police on a car chase. The officer reports that the suspect is traveling north at 100 miles per hour. The officer has reported the suspect's

instantaneous speed.

acceleration.

average speed.

velocity.

Answer 1

@zepdrix can you able to help me with this?

Answer 2

it is velocity, right?

Answer 3

I would be inclined to think that it's his average speed, because he's traveling a distance over a certain time interval.

But they also gave us the DIRECTION.
Are you familiar with vectors? :)

Speed is a SCALAR, it tells us how fast something is going.
Another example of a scalar would be, temperature. We don't specify a direction, it's just one dimensional. It's either increasing or decreasing.

Velocity can be expressed as a VECTOR, not a scalar. It has a MAGNITUDE (speed) and DIRECTION(north).

Soooooo, I would think it's velocity, since they specified the DIRECTION! :D

Acceleration also has direction though. So we gotta make sure we read the question properly. But acceleration is the rate of change of speed, so that wouldn't apply here.

I'm not 100% confident with that answer though, maybe like 80%.
I'm not the best person to answer physics questions, its definitely not my best subject ^^ lol. You might wanna get a second opinion heh.

Answer 4

Ok thank a lot for coming and helping :)

Answer 5

@UnkleRhaukus what do you think about this?