Motion and Forces

Imagine that you are travelling thousands of miles to visit a country in the southern hemisphere, Australia. Suddenly, vivid reds and blues brighten the green of the rainforest as a group of macaws swoop down and perch above you in a nut tree. They swack at each other as they crack nuts with their powerful jaws and eat the meat. Then you see the kangaroo hopping and then, suddenly vanish from sight. These are some examples of motion and force. Your plane to the smallest continent in the world is another. While moving objects are very common in our daily lives, measuring the motion of an object is a very sophisticated notion.

In this chapter, you will be introduced to three of the useful ways of measuring and describing motion: speed, velocity, and acceleration. You will find examples of motion and describe how fast different objects move. You will measure the speeds of various common moving things.