Inclined Planes + More Practice

Today's Bellwork: What was wrong with the setup for the lab on Monday/Tuesday? Answer: we said that the net force on the cart was equal to the weight of our hanging object. That would only be true if the acceleration of the hanging object was zero, which it was not.

This means the actual, measured acceleration was smaller than the math predicted it would be. This effect is more pronounced at smaller cart masses (or larger values of 1/m). This tipped your best fit line for a vs. (1/m) down, decreasing the magnitude of its slope and therefore decreasing your calculated value for the mass of the hanging object.


After that big discussion, we went through how to deal with inclined planes. There is only one major change:



After you tip the axes you proceed pretty much the same as yesterday.

Hopefully you started your homework in class:

p. 117 #27 & 28