Question

Choose two animals with different speeds. You can choose from the chart that starts at the bottom of this page or do research to choose your own.

Answer 1

Just need help walking through it please.

Answer 2

since you want the times to be the same, pick a time length for the race, then back out the distances each animal has to travel.

Which 2 animals did you choose?

Answer 3

ostrich and lion

Answer 4

ok. now pick how many hours you want the race to be

Answer 5

you can pick pretty much any number

Answer 6

3 hours

Answer 7

ok. now calculate the distance both animals would have to travel to make the race fair. Use

\[distance = speed * time\]

Answer 8

Can you help me with that? I am sorry, i'm just very confused

Answer 9

using the cheetah as an example, we want to find out the distance the cheetah can run in 3 hours. So we use the 70 mph from the table, and multiply it by the time you chose to get the number of miles.

For cheetah
distance = (70 mph)(3 hrs) = 210 miles

Answer 10

try it for the lion and ostrich

Answer 11

the lion could go 150 miles and the ostrich could go 120

Answer 12

yes, so that does it for #2

Answer 13

for #3, use the numbers from the previous question to create your system of equations.

Are you using x & y for your variables or d & t?

Answer 14

x and y

Answer 15

ok. so let x be the time since the race started.
and let y be the animal's distance from the finish line

Answer 16

since they're getting closer to the finish line, make the speed negative.
y = -speed * x + distance

For example with the cheetah the speed was 70 mph and the distance was 210 miles, so the equation is

\(y=-70x+210\)

Follow this pattern to write the equations for the lion and ostrich

Answer 17

y = -50 150 and y = -40 + 120?

Answer 18

you have to keep the x's, so
\(y=-50x+150\) and \(y=-40x+120\)

Answer 19

ooh okay

Answer 20

that's the system.
Pretty much all you have to do is graph both line and show that they intersect at (3, 0) because after 3 hours both animals will be 0 miles from the finish line.

Answer 21

okay, thank you so much for helping

Answer 22

you're welcome