Question

1) A cart of mass 15.3kg is pulled at a 45.0° angle up from the horizontal with a force of 44.6N.What is the acceleration of the cart?

Answer 1

The free body diagram is shown below:

Now from Newton's second law we know that:

$\begin{gathered} F_x=ma_x \\ F_y=ma_y \end{gathered}$

Where Fx anf Fy are the components of the resultant force. In this case we don't expect the cart to move in the x direction, then we only need to study the x direction. For it we have that:

$\begin{gathered} 44.6\cos 45=(15.3)a_x \\ a_x=\frac{44.6\cos 45}{15.3} \\ a_x=2.06 \end{gathered}$

Therefore the acceleration of the cart is 2.06 meters per second per second (using two decimal places)