please help me solve this problem for my algebra class that im curently taking in college. Math110

Question

The distance, D, in feet traveled by a freely falling object is given by the equation D = 16t² where t is time in seconds. Use this formula to find the time it would take for an object to fall to the ground from the top of a building that is 144 feet high. 

Answer 1

So we have the equation D=16t² where t is time and D is the distance that the free falling object would fall. We know that the building is 144 ft high so an object that fell from the top to the ground would be falling 144 ft so D=144 ft. Now, we can plug this into the equation that we were given to get 144=16t². At this point, there are a couple of ways that you could go about solving this (completing the square, factoring, taking the square root, etc)<---- this is because we are working with a quadratic. Normally, we don't take the square root of both sides because we don't want to forget about the the negative solution, but in this case we are are solving for time which is always positive so we can go ahead and do take the square root. Below, I demonstrated what I did.,

144=16t² (take the square root of both sides)

12=4t (divide by 4)

3=t

Alternatively, you could have simplified before taking the square root like I did below.

144=16t² (divide both sides by 16)

9=t² (then take the square root of both sides)

3=t

A full answer would be something like, it would take a free falling object 3 seconds to fall to the ground from the top of a 144 ft tall building.