speed of the falcon in meters?

Question

a falcon flew 70 miles in 3 hours. what was the speed of the falcon in meters?

Answer 1

70 mi        5280 ft         12 in          2.54 cm       1 m 

-------   x   ---------   x     --------  x     ----------   x  ----------  =  oops, sorry: I can't cancel h

3 h             1 mi              1 ft                in             100 cm

 

 

Just kidding.  Speed is in meters per hour.  I understand, you wanted the speed in terms of meters.

Dimensional Analysis (factor-label) is nice because you mult.div.depending on whatever will bring the final result with the correct dimension.

I had to do a lot of edits to get everything lined up above.  I hope it is similarly lined up at least as well on your computer screen.

 

Let's reason out the conversions. (I will ignore sig.figs. so you might better follow along with your calculator.)

 

First, 70 miles is how many feet? Answer to this is found by multiplying 70 mi times 5280 feet per each of those 70 mi.:  70 x 5280  feet = 369600 feet

 

369600 feet is how many inches?  Ans. is 369600 x 12 inches = 4435200  inches.

 

4435200 inches is how many centimeters:  Answer is 4435200 x 2.54  cm. = 11265408 cm.

 

11265408 cm is how many meters: Answer is 11265408 divided by 100  m  =   112654.08 m

 

112654.08 m in 3 hours is how many m in one hour?  112654.08 divided by 3  m  =  37551.36 m.

 

So the Falcon's speed is 37551.36 meters per hour.

 

 

 

Answer 2

You are, probably, asking about meters per second (m/s). 

One mile is equal to 1612 meters (some resources use 1610 oe 1609 meters). 

Also we have to change 1hour (1h) to seconds. 1h = 3600 s.

 

Thus, we have 

 

   70 mi/3h = 70x1612 m/(3x 3600)s = 10.45 m/s.