Randall D. Knight — Force and Motion: Problem 41

In lab, you propel a cart with four known forces while using an ultrasonic motion detector to measure the cart's acceleration. Your data are as follows: Force (N) Acceleration (m/s2) 0.25 0.5 0.50 0.8 0.75 1.3 1.00 1.8 a. How should you graph these data so as to determine the mass of the cart from the slope of the line? That is, what values should you graph on the horizontal axis and what on the vertical axis? b. Is there another data point that would be reasonable to add, even though you made no measurements? If so, what is it? c. What is your best determination of the cart's mass?