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zkralles

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  1. I'd like to disagree with this. If you drop a peice of paper (flat side down), and at the same time drop a peice of paper that is crumbled up, the crumbled peice of paper will drop atleast twice as fast. This is because the drag force acts less on the object since it has a lot smaller surface area. Even though they had the same mass, they didnt have the same speed. When you bring this into play, you can see how some lighter objects would fall faster then heavier objects. If you took two peices of paper (doubling the mass by taping two together), and then dropped a crumbled up peice of one paper and dropped both of them simaltaneously, the crumbled up peice of paper would still fall faster because the drag force is smaller. When you look at it this way, it really depends what the shape of the object is. But like Elliot56 put it so well, Ceteris Paribus, as mass increases the terminal velocity increases
  2. Idealy, all objects fall at the same rate. If there were no air resistance, like in a regents physics world, calculated the speed of a falling object is quite easy. However, we do have air resistance and that causes objects to fall at different speeds. In a recent lab that my class did, we used a tracking device and coffee filters, and measured the displacement over time of the coffee filter as it fell to the floor. Suprising, the graphs were always linear, but had a different slope based on the number of coffee filters. This means that the coffee filters, due to the large drag force on them, reached terminal velocity very quickly. The more coffee filters we dropped together (representing higher weights) the steeper the slope. The slope of a Displacement x Time graph is Velocity. Because the slope increased as we added more coffee filters, we can concur that the Terminal velocity increased as we added mass, and heavier objects do fall faster. However, that was for uniform aerodynamics. If we had thrown an array of objects into play, we would have had mixed data. The lightest thing in the world will fall the fastest if it is perfectly aeordynamic.
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