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Question from Stephanie, a student:

How much time does it take for a student running at an average speed of 5.00 m/s to cover a distance of 2.00 km?

Hi Stephanie,

The units are the key here. The problem has the distance in kilometres and the speed in metres per second. I want both length units so I am going to convert the distance of 2 kilometres to 2000 metres since there are 1000 meters in a kilometre.

Now I have a distance in metres, a rate an metres/second and I want the time in seconds.

metres x seconds/metre=seconds

Thus what I want is

2000/5 = 400 seconds

This is a lot of seconds so you probably should convert it to minutes and seconds.

Penny

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