trouble writing an equation

Question

Flopsy and Mopsy are resting under the old oak tree. Flopsy spots a carrot in Farmer Brown's garden and starts hopping to get it. It is 32 ft away. Flopsy can hop at 3 ft per second. Five seconds later, Mopsy realizes teh carrot is there and starts hopping toward it. He can hop at 5 ft/ sec, so he thinks he canget it.
I know that Flopsy gets the flower at 10.66 seconds and Mopsy would arrive at more than 11 seconds. The equation for Flopsy i have s(3)=32 but I cannot figure out how to add in the headstart i thought it would be s(5)-5=32 but that is def not correct.

Answer 1

You need to find the distance of the headstart. Since Flopsy travels at .33s/1ft, a 5 sec headstart would be a headstart of 1.65ft. When you deduct the headstart from the full distance it takes Flopsy 10.02 sec to reach the carrot.

 

30.35 • 3/1 = F > 32 • 5/1 = M

 

F (Flopsy) reaches the carrot in 10.02 sec

M (Mopsy) gets there in 6.4 sec

 

3ft per sec = 1ft per .33 sec

5ft per sec = 1ft per .2 sec

 

You aren't correct in your first calculation for how long it takes them to reach the carrot, but you never really said what the equation was to represent so I'm not sure I've found what you need. If you are to write an equation to show the difference in the amount of time it takes them to get the carrot, then I can show you that, but I need to know what the equation is supposed to represent.

Answer 2

The time it takes Mopsy to arrive is found the same

way as for Flopsy:

 

distance/velocity + 5 seconds

 

(32 ft)/(5 ft/sec) = 6.4 seconds of hopping time

But... Mopsy started 5 seconds late so from the

start time the travel time to the carrot for

Mopsy is  6.4 + 5 = 11.4 seconds