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What is a parameter and how to solve? (1 Viewer)

InteGrand

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For the first picture, the displacement vector of the plane is found by subtracting initial coordinates from final coordinates. This means the displacement vector is .

So the distance travelled in the 1 minute is . So the velocity of the plane is 18 km/min (i.e. ) in the direction of . (I assume you're asking for the velocity of the plane.)
Edit: just realised the second image contains the questions
 

braintic

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What are they getting at in part c? Surely time itself would be used as the parameter. Are they saying m is the time?
 

InteGrand

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c) The fighter's position vector r is given by , where is the velocity vector and is the initial position of the fighter, and t corresponds to the time elapsed (you could use m instead of t as the parameter, but t seems more natural to me).

The velocity vector is found by dividing the displacement vector in my previous post by the time taken (which is ).

Hence , where the units for the components of this vector are km/h. (Units of the scalar t are hours, so has units of km.)

So the fighter's position vector is for

d) The position vector of the fighter is . Hence the squared distance of the fighter from the station (the origin) at any time is .

To minimise distance, we can minimise squared distance.

.

Set this to 0 to find minimum distance (if the solution is a positive t, this corresponds to a positive time, hence a feasible solution).

.

Hence the fighter plane is closest when hours have passed.

Plugging in this value of t to the fighter's position vector, we get the required point to be .

e) required distance is .

f) Done in my previous post. 1080 km/h

g) The fighter's rate of ascent or descent is given by the third component of the velocity vector, which is +720. Hence the plane is ascending at a rate of 720 km/h, or, in more natural units, 200 m/s.
 
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Trebla

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please post questions outside the HSC course in the Extracurricular Topics forum
 

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