Final answer:
Crumple zones in cars help protect passengers by absorbing impact and increasing the time of the impact, reducing the force on occupants. The longer impact time lessens the chance of severe injuries by spreading the force over a longer period.
Step-by-step explanation:
Maintaining space around your vehicle is crucial for several reasons, including preventing scratches, helping others to avoid crashing into you, and providing distance to react in emergencies to avoid a crash. The modern engineering of automobiles has focused on safety by designing vehicles to have parts that crumple or collapse during an accident, which serves to protect the passengers.
The correct answer to the question of how crumple zones help protect passengers in a car accident is: a. It reduces injury to the passengers by increasing the time of impact. This is because a longer time of impact results in a lower force exerted on the passengers over that time period, thanks to the physics principle of impulse, which states that force times time equals momentum change. With crumple zones, the force exerted on the car's occupants is less intense over a longer period, which helps to reduce injuries.
Collision Theory
According to collision theory and the concept of impulse, padding and airbags in a car help to extend the time over which a force acts on the car's occupants in the event of a sudden stop. Likewise, modern cars employ plastics and crumple zones to lengthen the collision time and thereby reduce the force experienced by passengers.