Hairy Questions
Topic #1.1: Slope and Rate of Change
Slope is a rate of change.
Many of the quantities you have already encountered in your study of physics are rates of change of other
quantities. For example:
● Velocity is the rate of change of position with respect to time.
● Acceleration is the rate of change of velocity with respect to time.
● Force is the rate of change of momentum with respect to time.
● Current is the rate of change of electric charge with respect to time.
● Induced Voltage is the rate of change of magnetic flux with respect to time.
And there were many times when you found the rate of change by graphing the quantity vs. time and
then evaluating the slope of the resulting line. Let’s look at a non-physics example:
Experiment: For one year, you let your hair grow, measuring the length at the end of every week.
You graph the results of your experiment (shown at right), along with the line of best fit.
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There are some questions that we can answer by reading the information directly from this graph. For
example:
1. How long was your hair after week 10?
2. When did your hair reach a length of 15 inches?
3. How much longer did your hair grow between the end of week 20 and the end of week
30?
Then there are questions that you answer by finding the slope.
4. What was the average rate of hair growth over the first 5 weeks?
5. What was the average rate of hair growth between week 10 and week 20?
6. What was the average rate of hair growth for the entire year?
7. At what rate was your hair growing at the end of week 30?
Questions 4, 5 and 6 are all answered the same way: you find the rise over run to determine the rate of
change. This should remind you of your first weeks in physics class, studying kinematics. We could even
call this slope the “hair velocity” if we like.
And in fact, you should get the same answer to all three questions. The graph is linear. You will find the
same slope no matter what two points you pick. We can say that your hair is growing at constant velocity.
Question 7 is different from the others in a subtle but important way. It asks you to find the growth rate
at a specific time – and not over a time interval! It is asking for an instantaneous rate of change, not an
average. Fortunately, this time, it’s still an easy question. Since we have seen that the growth is at a
constant rate, it is reasonable to assume that the rate at any particular instant is the same as the average
rate for the entire period (or in fact, any period you pick! It doesn’t matter – the rate is constant.)
But while that gives us an answer, it also lets us side-step some important questions:
1. How would we find the rate of change at a given time if your hair growth rate wasn’t
constant?
2. What do we even mean by the rate AT a given time? Don’t you need to compare TWO
times in order to find a rate of change?
We’ll consider these in the next reading, when you experiment with some hair growth acceleration tonic
you found online.
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Even Hairier
Topic #1.2: Acceleration
In the last reading, we reported on the results of your hair-growing experiment. Now suppose that at the
end of the year, you go back and analyze your year of hair growth. You can see from the graph that your
hair grew steadily at a rate of 0.3 inches per week. That was the slope of the graph no matter what time
interval you chose to examine. So we concluded that the rate was constant.
If we feel like it, instead of graphing hair length, we could graph the growth rate instead.
This graph is not that exciting. Since your hair grew at the same rate week after week, this graph is a
horizontal line. But it is important to understand that we are still talking about the same experiment.
The first graph showed hair length. That graph slopes uphill at a constant rate. This new graph shows
growth rate – it is the slope of the previous graph. And since that graph had a constant slope, this new
graph is horizontal.
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Now let’s suppose that you were not satisfied with the year’s hair growth. So you search the internet for
hair growth accelerators. And let’s also pretend that you find one that really works as advertised. It
promises that if you use it every day, you will experience steadily increasing hair growth rates. In fact,
they promise:
Guaranteed Acceleration = 0.023 inches/week2
Exactly what does this mean? If you are new to physics, it is possible that you don’t know how to interpret
this guarantee. I mean, what is a “week squared” anyway?
Still, you decide to try it. In the interest of science, you shave off your hair on New Year’s Day and begin
the experiment. Here are your results:
Now that’s some seriously long hair! In one year, your hair has grown nearly four feet! And when we look
at the graph of growth rate, it is now a little more interesting:
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Your rate of hair growth certainly increased. It was 0.3 inches per week at the beginning of the year. And
by the end of the year, the rate had increased to 1.5 inches per week, increasing by 1.2 inches per week
over the course of the year. But the increase did not happen all at once. The growth rate increased
steadily.
By how much did the growth rate increase each week? We can answer this question two different ways.
1. Since we know that the rate increase for the entire year was 1.2 inches per week, we can divide to
find the weekly increase: 1.2 ÷ 52 ≈ 0.023 inches per week per week
Let’s make sure to understand what we just figured out. Each week, the growth rate increases by
0.023 inches per week. At the beginning of the year, the rate was 0.3 inches per week. After 1
week, it will have increased to 0.3 + 0.023 = 0.323 inches per week. After 2 weeks, it will increase
an additional 0.023 inches per week to 0.3 + 0.023 +0.023 = 0.346 inches per week. In other words:
Hair Growth Acceleration = .023 (inches/week)/week
When we are being more succinct, we write: 0.023 inches/week2
2. We can also find the growth rate by evaluating the slope of the graph of growth rate. Just like hair
“velocity” is the slope of the graph of hair length vs. time, hair acceleration is the slope of the
velocity graph. And since that graph is linear, we can pick any two points to calculate the rise over
run.
Using the points I have chosen, we get a rise of .6 inches per week over a run of 26 weeks which comes out
to a slope of 0.6 ÷ 026 ≈ 0.023 (inches/week)/week, just as we expected.
But to even draw a graph like this, we must somehow believe that at any given moment in time, your hair
is growing at some particular rate. So now let’s look back at the graph of hair length vs. time:
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You can see that this graph is NOT linear. As time passes, the slope gets steeper because your hair
growth is accelerating. Every instant, the rate is changing. Again, we seem to be talking about
instantaneous growth rates. That’s our next topic.
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Velocity NOW!
Topic #1.3: Instantaneous Rates of Change
When we examine the graph of your accelerating hair growth, it’s easy to show that the growth rate is
increasing. We can examine average growth rates for successive time intervals.
For example, we could choose to look at 10-week intervals, calculating rise over run for each interval. You
should check for yourself to see that the average growth rate increased from just under 0.5 inches/week
over the first 10-week interval to nearly triple that rate over the fifth 10-week interval.
Those are still just average rates. But what if you wanted to know how fast your hair was growing right
NOW!? Not over a finite interval but at a specific moment. There is a way to answer that question too.
But you may have philosophical or mathematical objections. “If no time passes, how can ANYTHING
have a rate of change?”
The way we answer this kind of question is by making use of the idea of a limit. Essentially, to find the
slope at a given point, we start by finding the slope between two different points: the point we were asked
about and another point a little later. But then we move that second point closer to the first one. How
close? Reeeeeeeally close but not all the way there. And as it gets closer, we look to see if there is a value
that the slope approaches. If so, we use that value as the instantaneous rate of change.
There are many websites that explore this concept in greater depth. And they have some nice
animations. Here’s a few:
http://clas.sa.ucsb.edu/staff/lee/Secant,%20Tangent,%20and%20Derivatives.htm
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aajoFlJIklYdW6R7g_fU7ciQXsn_HaBA/view?usp=share_link
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Here is an animation taken from the first website listed above:
Here is a video from the second link above:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1aajoFlJIklYdW6R7g_fU7ciQXsn_HaBA/view?usp=sharing
We will leave most of the details for your math teachers to explain. But we will point out that this is
exactly why they want you to learn about limits. Limits are the mathematical way to say “reeeeally close
but not all the way there”. It’s reasonable to say that limits were invented as a way of dealing with
precisely this question: how do we find the slope of a line at a given point?
As your physics teachers, we want you to know two ways to deal with this question.
1. WITHOUT CALCULUS
Here is a graphical method that will give us an approximate answer (This is the method we use in
AP Physics 1):
Method #1: Use a ruler to draw a tangent line. The slope of that tangent line is also the
instantaneous rate of change.
So let’s say you wanted to how fast your hair was growing at the end of week #20. (Note carefully:
we are not looking for the average rate over the first 20 weeks. We are looking for the
instantaneous rate exactly at t = 20 weeks! It’s a different question.)
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After you draw the tangent line, you choose any two points on that line and use them to calculate
rise over run. So, using the values we get from the graph above, we calculate that the slope of the
tangent line is (15 inches)/(20 weeks) = 0.75 inches/week. So now we know:
At week #20, the instantaneous velocity of hair growth was .75 inches/week.
2. WITH CALCULUS
The point of the entire discussion up until this point has really been to remind you about the idea
of slope as a rate of change and to introduce (or re-introduce) what we mean by instantaneous rate
of change. But we don’t expect that we will be drawing many tangent lines by hand during AP
Physics C. When we need to know the slope of a graph, there are formulas for that kind of thing.
We’ll start looking at those formulas in the next module.
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Module #1 Practice Problems
Directions: Solve the following problems on a separate sheet of paper. Organize your solutions,
show all work, and write neatly.
1. Velocity is the rate of change of position with respect to time. Calculate the velocity of the object
shown in the graph above.
2. Acceleration is the rate of change of velocity with respect to time. Calculate the acceleration of the
object represented in the graph shown above during each of the following time intervals:
a. t = 0 min to t = 10 min
b. t = 10 min to t = 15 min
c. t = 15 min to t = 40 min
d. t = 40 min to t = 55 min
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3. Determine the velocity of the object represented in
the graph at right at each of the following points:
a. Point A
b. Point B
c. Point C
d. Point D
e. Point E
f. Point F
g. Point G
4. At which point(s) does the object experience its
maximum speed?
5. At which point(s) is the object at rest?
6. Speed is the rate of change of distance with respect to time. Sketch a graph of speed vs. time of the object
represented in the graph shown above.
7. Acceleration is the rate of change of velocity with respect to time. Sketch a graph of acceleration vs. time for
the object represented in the graph shown above.
Click here to check your answers to Module #1 Practice Problems
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