You have joined the RCMP and as a constable patrol highway 5 between Merritt and

Question

You have joined the RCMP and as a constable patrol highway 5 between Merritt and Kamloops for the Merritt RCMP in your airplane. You are responsible for catching speeders along a stretch of road where the speed limit is 110 km/h. Due to cutbacks, you are not equipped with Doppler laser or other fancy radar equipment, but only a stopwatch. You know the distance between two obvious landmarks on the road is exactly 2.5 km.

How can you identify speed violators? Do you measure an instantaneous velocity or average velocity or instantaneous speed or average speed?

On a particular day, Constable Silvie, from the RCMP detachment in Kamloops has set up a speed trap using a radar gun. She is partially hidden on the side of the highway where she can measure the speed of the cars (directly in km/h) using a radar gun before most of the drivers spot her. Her location is between the two landmarks used by YOU. If she detects a speeder, two police further down the road pull the car over and issue a ticket.

How can Constable Silvie identify speed violators? What does she measure?

Now on this particular day, you are tracking a red BMW heading north as a possible speeder. You measure the time for the BMW to travel the distance to be 70s. Unbeknownst to you, Silvie is also measuring the speed of the car. On this day, this particular driver DOES NOT get caught by Silvie and her team. However, 10 days later a ticket arrives in the mail to the driver of the BMW, issued by you!. The driver is very upset because clearly he was not speeding through Silvie’s speed trap, and so takes his case to court where both you and Silvie testify. The driver of the BMW is using PC Sylvie’s testimony as defence against the ticket issued by YOU.

Present a short version of how the driver of the BMW uses Silvie in support of his innocence.

Now examine and present your evidence. You must argue your case to the judge and explain how the BMW could be speeding and not speeding. How can you explain PC Sylvie’s testimony, yet support your claim? Your solution should present a graphical argument AND a numeric argument.

Has the driver been wrongly accused by you?

Your last statement should be a ruling by the judge and must be a logical conclusion based on the evidence/arguments. Is the driver innocent or guilty?

Recall your mark depends on clearly presenting figure/graph, calculations, AND a written explanation.

Explanation / Answer

as the only equipment available is a stopwatch and the measure of distance between two landmarks, hence the person will measure average speed of the speedsters between these two points. TO identify speed violators the time taken by the speedster to cover this tistance is measured and distance upon time gives us the average speed between point A and B. If this speed is grater than the speed limit than the person is definitely a violator

constable silvie has a radar gun which sould help her to calculate speed of the violator at any instant of time. This speed is the instantaneous speed of th eperson

distance = 2.5 km = 2500 m
time = 70 s
average speed = 2500/70 = 35.714 m/s
so if the dirver isnt caught by the other team it means that the driver's speed was measured by the tem in some other place and as trhe person was caught in the speed trap set by the landmarks, it means that the person had higher than speed limit speed in between these two landmarks and not at the location where the speed was checkjed by the other team.

but as the given location of the team two is between the two landmarks, and teasm two was reading the instantaneous speed of the driver the whole time the driver was between the two landmarks. Now since the speed of the driver was never greatyer than the spoeed limit as measured instantaneously by team 2, it also means that the driver's averagfe speed cannot be greater than the speed limit and hence the driver has been wrongly accused of overspeeding

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