Displacement And Distance - Blog Posts

Do you think you could possibly help me understand the graphical relationships between a position vs time, velocity vs time, and acceleration vs time graph? My homework is one of the graphs is given and I have to sketch the other two and I'm so confused!

Certainly. The main things to realize are that

1. velocity is the slope of position and acceleration the slope of velocity2. if acceleration is constant, velocity will be a straight line and if acceleration is zero position will be a straight line.

Mostly you’ll be dealing with constant acceleration. Which means velocity will be changing, which means position will not be flat. This is what it looks like when a car gains speed, for instance:

If you threw a ball in the air, the parabola would be upside down, and the velocity graph point down, which means IT’S slope would be negative. So where would the acceleration line be then?