When a horse pulls a 88 kg buggy down the road with a force of 64 N, the buggy makes an angle of 35 degrees above the horizontal. Neglecting friction, whats the magnitude of the buggy's acceleration?

Answer 1

You'll want to start by drawing a basic free-body diagram of this situation, which will include the buggy, and the force from the horse pulling the buggy. Since the question tells us the buggy is being pulled at an angle, we know this force can be broken up into vertical and horizontal components (also called x and y components if you're thinking of an axis). The buggy isn't moving up and down; it is only moving horizontally, so for this question we only need to look at the horizontal component of the force. To do this, we will multiply the total force by the cosine of the angle, which gives us 64cos(35)=53.24N.

Now that we know the horizontal force, we can plug this into our F=ma (force=mass*acceleration) equation to find our missing acceleration. Plugging in the buggy's mass, we get the equation 53.24N=(88kg)a. Dividing both sides by 88kg gives us a=0.61. The acceleration of the horse, therefore, should be 0.61 meters per second.