A wagon is pulled by a handle making an upward angle of 25° with a force of 25 N. What is the horizontal force pulling the wagon foward? What is the force lifting the wagon off the road?

Answer 1

Alyssa,
I suggest you draw a freebody diagram of the wagon and the handle.

Youll notice that the handle has a force of magnitude 20N with a direction of 25 degrees above the horizontal.

Now write your force summation using Newton's second law.
Let Ft be the magnitude of force of the handle and theta be the angle.

Fnetx = ma = Ftcos(theta)
Fnety = ma = Ftsin(theta)

Those are your two equations, since your freebody diagram is drawn, you know that Fy is lifting the cart and Fx is pulling the cart in the horizontal.
Hope you can solve that, plug and chug.

Beware forces get harder to understand from here, ALWAYS draw a picture, freebody diagram of all forces and write your summation based on your diagrams :)