Today’s Spokesperson is…

the person closest to the center aisle!!

Welcome to
AP Physics!
Prepare to
learn stuff!
Whiteboard: Units are your Friend!
The Vietnamese iguana clams at a rate of 8
crankers per week. How many crankers does
the iguana clam in a span of 4 months?

Hint: You don’t need to know any physics to figure this out
What units do we want our answer to have?
• crankers

What units do our given quantities have?

• crankers/week
• weeks

4 weeks 8 crankers
= 32 crankers
week
By using units to your advantage, you can:

• Check your work

• Make an educated guess if you’re stuck
• Help yourself remember an equation that you
have forgotten

If the units of your result don’t work out to

what you wanted, you need to go back and
check your work!
Converting units of area and volume
• A standard sheet of paper is 8.5 inches wide
and 11 inches long. How many square feet are
in a sheet of paper?

8.5 in x 11 in = 93.5 in2

How many square inches are in a square foot?

 12 inches = 1 foot

12 inches
1 in2

Do 12 inches2 = 1 foot2?
12 inches
No.
1 foot2
When working with units of area, you must
square the conversion factor for length
• 1 ft = 12 in
• 1 ft2 = 122 in2 = 144 in2

93.5 in2 1 ft2 2

= 0.65 ft
144 in2
 Your Turn!
How many cubic millimeters are in a cubic meter?

Produce two different (yet equivalent) ways of

producing the conversion factor!
 Answer: 1 x 109 mm3
When working with units of volume, you
need to cube the length conversion factors

1 m = 1,000 mm
Method 1:
1 m3 = (1,000 mm) * (1,000 mm) * (1,000 mm)
1 m3 = 1 x 109 mm3

1 m = 1,000 mm
Method 2: (1 m)3 = (1,000 mm)3

1 m3 = 1,0003 mm3
1 m3 = 1 x 109 mm3
 Proportional Reasoning:
“Making difficult problems into easy ones!” ®
A car that is traveling at 20 mi/hr requires at least
2 feet to stop at full braking force. If the car were
instead traveling at 100 mi/hr with all other
factors kept the same, in how many feet could it
stop?
BUT, with a little
proportional reasoning,
this problem is quick
and easy!
 vf2 = v02 + 2ax
• Car comes to a stop: vf = 0 m/s

0 = v02 + 2ax  x = -v02/(2a)

This means that the car’s stopping distance (x) is

proportional to the square of its initial velocity (v02)

x α v02
 x α v02

This means that whatever happens to v0,

the square of that will happen to x!

20 mi/hr 2 ft
x5 x25
100 mi/hr 50 ft
 Try it – you’ll like it!
Two cars on a racetrack each start off at rest
at the origin and have identical
accelerations. The only difference between
them is that car B accelerates for four times
as long as car A.
If car A’s position at the end of accelerating
is 20 m, what is car B’s position after it is
finished accelerating?
You will need to reason using the equation
xf = xo + v0t + ½at2
 xf = xo + v0t + ½at2

• “start out at rest at the origin”: x0 = 0, v0 = 0

• xf =½at2
• xf α t2
This means that whatever happens to t,
the square of that will happen to xf!

If car B is accelerating for four times as long, it

will have gone sixteen times as far as car A
 Car A: xf = 20 m
Car B: xf = 20 x 16 =320 m
If you are ever asked to compare two objects, or you
initially feel that you don’t have enough information
to solve a problem, chances are that you will need to
use proportional reasoning to solve it!
•Most students are never taught how to use it – the world is yours!

•You can use it throughout your college education to save time and
impress your professors

•At first, you may want to crunch the numbers to check your answer
as you become comfortable with using proportional reasoning.