1. At the amusement park, you decide to ride the Ferris wheel, which has a maximum height of 50 meters and a diameter of 35 meters. It takes the wheel three minutes to make one revolution. If you start your ride at the midline and the ferris wheel rotates counter clockwise, how many seconds will it take for your seat to reach a height of 50 meters? Round the answer to the nearest second.

a.)59 seconds
b.)58 seconds
c.)45 seconds
d.)15 seconds

2. At the amusement park, you decide to ride the Ferris wheel, which has a maxmum height of 80 meters and a diameter of 40 meters. It takes the wheel seven minutes to make one revolution. If you start your ride at the midline and the ferris wheel rotates counter clockwise, how many seconds will it take for your seat to reach a height of 60 meters? Round the answer to the nearest second.
a.)0 seconds
b.)10 seconds
c.)20 seconds
d.)40 seconds

Thanks!!!

1 answer

no ideas of your own to provide? These two problems are really the same thing with different numbers. As you might imagine, the trick is to come up with a function you can analyze.

So, on the first one,

if we are starting at the midline, then since sin(0) = 0, we expect to have some variation on

y = sin(x)+

diameter of 35m means a radius of 17.5m So, you will have

y = 17.5 sin(x)

The midline is one radius velow the maximum, so

y = 50-17.5sin(x)

The period is 3 minutes, so if t is in minutes,

y = 50 - 17.5 sin(2π/3 x)

Now you can work out the questions about what happens when.

Follow the same steps for the 2nd one.

Actually, the first one is so easy we wasted our time building up a function. Start-to-top is 1/4 revolution, or 3/4 minutes.