Answer:
15.6 meters/second
Explanation:
What a great piece of history most people have never heard of! If you go into Mechanical Engineering that'll be a case study you'll see, of why that massive steel tank failed. Can you imagine being drowned in a tsunami of molasses? Yuck!
But this is a simple unit-conversion problem: we need to convert miles per hour to meters per second.
To do that we need to know how many meters are in a mile, and how many seconds in an hour.
You can look up meters in a mile and find it's 1,609.
How many seconds are in an hour? If you don't know right off, what ratios DO you know about time? That there are 60 seconds in a minute, right? And 60 minutes in an hour? Knowing those two things, you multiply:
60 sec/min x 60 min/hr = 3600 sec/hr (Notice how minutes cancelled out, to leave sec/hr.)
Now that we know the conversion factors, the hardest part of this kind of problem is setting up the equation correctly. Pro tip: set it up so the units cancel out correctly, and are in the right positions, top or bottom.
Let's break it down and instead of converting 35 mph all at once, let's first convert the distance piece, then we'll do the time piece.
So to convert 35 miles to meters:
35 miles x 1,609 meters/mile = 56,315 meters
Was that clear? 1,609 meters in a mile, so just multiply by how many miles there are, and you end up with how many meters that is.
Now the time piece:
1 hour is the same thing as 3,600 seconds. We did that before:
60sec/min x 60min/hr = 3,600 seconds
Now we can work the problem because we've converted to the units the question asks for: meters and seconds.
We have a wave of molasses that travels 56,315 meters in 3,600 seconds, so to get meters per second, we simply divide, right? Meters/second means divide the meters by the seconds:
56,315 meters ÷ 3,600 seconds = 15.6 meters/second
(Because of significant figures (2 in '35'), maybe round that to 16m/s.)
You can do the conversion all in one step, but it's hard to show here. Have you seen the "railroad tracks" method of doing unit conversions? Imagine a looooong fraction bar with vertical dividers, and in each of those "cells" you put a value and its units. Then you go through and cancel out the units (if you set it up right), and then "do the math." I'll try to show it here:
_35 miles_|_1609 meters |_ hour_
hour | mile | 3600 sec
See how the units will cancel out: miles in the top of the big fraction gets cancelled by miles in the bottom. Same with hours in the top and the bottom. Just like with other fractions, if it's in the top AND in the bottom, then it divides out to 1, or "cancels out".
If that doesn't make sense, please find a teacher or someone who can explain it to you. It's very powerful, and quick.
So once you cancel out like units you see that you're left with "meters per second", and that's what the question wants. Which is important because it means you set it up correctly!
Then "the match" is just (35 x 1609)/3600.
And that's the same answer as before, it just does it all in one step.