Tina is going for a bike ride. When she leaves her house, she starts pedaling and her speed steadily increases for a while. Then she coasts for a while at a constant speed before she starts pedaling again, and her speed steadily increases again at a slower rate than it did before. When her legs get tired, she coasts at a constant speed again. Finally, she reaches her destination and her speed steadily decreases until she comes to a complete stop.

1 answer

Tina's bike ride can be described in terms of four distinct phases, each characterized by different patterns of speed and activity:

  1. Acceleration Phase: In this initial phase, Tina starts pedaling and her speed gradually increases. This can be depicted as a curve on a graph where time is on the x-axis and speed is on the y-axis, showing a positive slope as her speed increases steadily.

  2. Constant Speed Phase: After reaching a higher speed, she transitions into a coasting phase where she maintains a constant speed. This portion of the graph would appear as a horizontal line, indicating that her speed remains the same over this period.

  3. Second Acceleration Phase: Once she starts pedaling again, she accelerates once more, but this time at a slower rate than before. On the graph, this would again show an increasing speed, but with a gentler slope compared to the first acceleration phase.

  4. Second Constant Speed Phase: As she begins to tire, she coasts again at a constant speed. Similar to the earlier coasting phase, this would also appear as a horizontal line on the graph.

  5. Deceleration Phase: Finally, when she approaches her destination, she will gradually decrease her speed until she comes to a complete stop. This would be depicted as a downward sloping line on the graph, indicating a decrease in speed over time until it reaches zero.

Overall, if you were to plot her speed against time, you would see a series of slopes and flat sections corresponding to these distinct phases of her bike ride, with the drawing reflecting her changing pace throughout her journey.