Postsecondary • 1mo.
Hello I am having trouble with this past exam physics question specifically part c I showed my work for part a and b but now I’m confused for part c p, this is not graded it’s just practice for my upcoming exam.
Explanation from Alloprof
This Explanation was submitted by a member of the Alloprof team.
Thank you for your question!
As you correctly noted in the first part of the question, there are four forces acting on each object : friction, gravity, the reactive force, and the motor force pushing both blocks.
The vertical component of the force applied to mass 1 and the weight of each of the 2 masses are cancelled out by the normal force applied by the plane to the blocks. Consequently, only the horizontal component of the applied force is to be considered in the problem.
Since the coefficient of friction is the same for both blocks and block 2 represents one-third of the total mass, the force applied by block 1 on block 2 represents one-third of the horizontal component of the applied force.
This webpage of the Alloprof website explains forces:
This webpage of the Alloprof website explains Newton's third law of motion:
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