ball down ramp

Your work on ball down ramp has been received. Scroll down through the document to see any comments I might have inserted, and my final comment at the end.

Your general comment

Will a steeper ramp give greater or lesser time?

The time will be least on the steepest ramp because the ball is subjected to the largest component of acceleration due to gravity.

As slopes increases will time intervals increase, decrease or show no pattern?

The intervals would decrease from least to greatest because the ball is subjected to increasingly larger components of acceleration due to gravity.

Your report of 5 trials each way for 1 domino

The ball rolls 27 cm.

With one domino:

2.61

2.17

3.70

3.00

2.45

2.23

2.89

2.28

2.38

3.09

Your report of 5 trials each way for 2 dominoes

In the first set of trials, I was thinking that placing the dominos under both the left and right side helped to provide a more objective average of the effect this particular slope has on the time interval.

With two dominos:

1.20,

1.47,

1.44,

1.42,

1.34

1.28,

1.38,

1.42,

1.47,

1.50

Your report of 5 trials each way for 3 dominoes

1.02

.922

1.00

1.16

.984

.938

1.05

.984

1.03

.969

Do your results support or fail to support your hypothesis about increasing or decreasing times?

Support. The progressively steeper slopes clearly have progressively shorter intervals.

How do you think ave velocity is related to slope?

The steeper the slope, the greater the component of the acceleration due to gravity acting on the ball. Therefore, given an equivalent initial velocity, the final velocity will be progressively greater on progressively steeper slopes, resulting in a greater average velocity.

Speculate on why ave velocity changes with slope.

The component of the acceleration due to gravity which can be calculated given the angle of the slope.

How could you test your speculations?

Trigonometry allows us to calculate the exact value of the component of the acceleration due to gravity acting on a given mass on a given slope. Examples of such calcuations are provided in our textbook.