we just did an practical on newton's second law and we just have to do a report on it.... basically there are two parts to it, first part is when the overall mass of the system remains constant and the second part is when the force remains constant.

there are two parts which i am uncertain about, they are the results table and the graphs.

for part one as the mass is constant do i just average out the acceleration and then use that to find force using F=MA?

3 answers

Yes, generally that is the way to do it, because of the uncertainty of measursing acceleration.
so if my mass of the cart which was used was 0.24kg, and the mass hanger was 0.02kg, and average acceleration was 0.5734, then my force would be?
Force=m*a I assume your units for acceleration was in m/s^2