Question

Micro-bats use a form of radar called echolocation to navigate and find their prey such as flying insects. They locate the surrounding objects by bouncing sound wave pulses off these objects and detecting the time delay between the emitted pulses and the reflected pulses. Determine the time delay between the pulse emitted by the micro-bat and the detected pulse reflected from an insect located 10 m away from the micro-bat. Assume the approximate speed of sound waves to be 340 m-s-1

Answer 1

t = 5.88 10⁻² s

Step-by-step explanation:

The speed of the sound wave after it is emitted by the bat is constant, so we can use the uniform motion relationships

v =
`(x)/(t)`

t =
`(x)/(v)`

in this case the distance is that of the sound in going from the bat to the insect and back

x = 2d

x = 2 10

x = 20 m

let's calculate

t = 20/340

t = 5.88 10⁻² s

We can see that the time is very short, so the distance traveled by the two animals has little influence on the result.