If a car stops suddenly, you feel 'thrown forward.' We'd like to ...

Question

If a car stops suddenly, you feel 'thrown forward.' We'd like to understand what happens to the passengers as a car stops. Imagine yourself sitting on a very slippery bench inside a car. This bench has no friction, no seat back, and there's nothing for you to hold onto.

d. Describe what happens to you as the car slows down.

Accepted Answer

Hey, everyone. So this problem is asking about the relationship between velocity and acceleration when working with frictionless surfaces. So let's see what they're asking us. So when a vehicle takes off abruptly, you will jerk backwards to gain a better comprehension of this process, you place the box on a frictionless surface at the back of a pickup truck. There is no mechanism to secure the box explain what happens when the pickup truck takes off. So let's draw this out. So we have the bed of a pickup truck, we're gonna place our box in it, it's not secured and we know that we are working on a frictionless surface. So the only forces acting on this box, our weight and the normal force, there's nothing acting on it in the horizontal direction. So the bed will move due to the force from the motor, but the box will stay where it is in space until it hits the back of the truck. So until another force acts on this box, it will stay exactly where it is in space. And so it will move relative to the truck bed. And so when we look at our potential answers that aligns with choice B the box doesn't accelerate, it remains at a constant velocity which is at rest. So staying at zero is constant until it hits the back of the pickup. So that's all we have for this video. We'll see you in the next one.

Watch next