A student wanted to investigate changing the mass of a cart that you can push. The student pushed both carts with a force of 200 Newtons. If one cart has a mass of 100kg and the other cart a mass of 50kg, what results would the student expect to see as far as how fast each cart moved in comparison with one another?

1 answer

According to Newton's second law of motion, the acceleration of an object is directly proportional to the force applied to it and inversely proportional to its mass. The formula for acceleration is:

acceleration = force / mass

In this case, both carts are pushed with a force of 200 Newtons. Therefore, using the formula above, we can calculate the acceleration of each cart.

For the cart with a mass of 100kg:
acceleration_cart1 = 200 N / 100 kg = 2 m/s^2

For the cart with a mass of 50kg:
acceleration_cart2 = 200 N / 50 kg = 4 m/s^2

From these calculations, we can see that the cart with a mass of 50kg would experience twice the acceleration compared to the cart with a mass of 100kg. This means that the lighter cart would move faster than the heavier cart when pushed with the same force.