5/13/2019 Acceleration - Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Acceleration
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Acceleration is a measure of how fast velocity changes. Acceleration is the change of velocity divided by the change
of time. Acceleration is a vector, and therefore includes both a size and a direction.

Contents
Examples
Finding acceleration
Units of measurement
Other words
Newton's second law of motion
Deceleration

Examples
An object was moving north at 10 meters per second. The object speeds up and now is moving north at 15
meters per second. The object has accelerated.
An apple is falling down. It starts falling at 0 meters per second. At the end of the first second, the apple is moving
at 9.8 meters per second. The apple has accelerated. At the end of the second second, the apple is moving down
at 19.6 meters per second. The apple has accelerated again.
Jane is walking east at 3 kilometers per hour. Jane's velocity does not change. Jane's acceleration is zero.
Tom was walking east at 3 kilometers per hour. Tom turns and walks south at 3 kilometers per hour. Tom has had
a nonzero acceleration.
Sally was walking east at 3 kilometers per hour. Sally slows down. After, Sally walks east at 1.5 kilometers per
hour. Sally has had a nonzero acceleration.
Acceleration due to gravity

Finding acceleration
Acceleration is the rate of change of the velocity of an object. Acceleration can be found by using:

where

is the velocity at the start

is the velocity at the end
is the time at the start
is the time at the end

Sometimes the change in velocity is written as Δ . Sometimes the change in time is written as Δt.

In difficult situations, the acceleration can be calculated using mathematics: in calculus, acceleration is the derivative

of the velocity (with respect to time), .

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Units of measurement
Acceleration has its own units of measurement. For example, if velocity is measured in meters per second, and if time
is measured in seconds, then acceleration is measured in meters per second squared (m/s2).

Other words
Acceleration can be positive or negative. When the acceleration is negative (but the velocity does not change
direction), it is sometimes called deceleration. For example, when a car brakes it decelerates. Physicists usually only
use the word "acceleration".

Newton's second law of motion

Newton's laws of motion are rules for how things move. These rules are called "laws of motion". Isaac Newton is the
scientist who first wrote down the main laws of motion. According to Newton's Second Law of Motion, the force
something needs to accelerate an object depends on the object's mass (the amount of "stuff" the object is made from or
how "heavy" it is). The formula of Newton's Second Law of Motion is , where is the acceleration, is the
force, and the mass. This formula is very well-known, and it is very important in physics. Newton's Second Law of
Motion, in short "Newton's Second Law", is often one of the first things that physics students learn.

Deceleration
Deceleration is the opposite of acceleration. This means that something slows down instead of speeding up. For
example, when a car brakes, it is decelerating.

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This page was last changed on 10 March 2019, at 01:58.

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