Question

A girl is riding a bicycle at 2.0 m/s and throws a tennis ball horizontally forward at a speed of 1.0 m/s from a height of 1.5 m. At the exact same time, a boy standing on the sidewalk drops a tennis ball straight down from a height of 1.5 m. Ignoring air resistance, which ball will hit the ground first?

A) The girl's thrown ball
B) The boy's dropped ball
C) Both balls will hit the ground simultaneously
D) Not enough information to determine

Answer 1

Both the girl's thrown ball and the boy's dropped ball, falling from the same height and ignoring air resistance, will hit the ground simultaneously because horizontal motion does not affect the time taken to fall.

Step-by-step explanation:

The question at hand involves horizontal and vertical motion in the context of projectile motion. In physics, when an object is thrown horizontally, the horizontal motion and vertical motion are independent of each other. This means that the horizontal velocity of the object has no effect on the time it takes for the object to fall to the ground, which is influenced only by the vertical motion due to gravity. Given that both the girl's thrown ball and the boy's dropped ball fall from the same height of 1.5 m and we're ignoring air resistance, both balls will hit the ground simultaneously. The horizontal throw of the girl's tennis ball does not affect the time it takes to hit the ground when compared to the boy's ball that is simply dropped.