Question

Golfer Tiger Woods drives a golf ball with a vertical speed of 144 ft/sec at the time when he hits the ball with his club. The height function of one of his drives is H=-161 +1441, where t is the time in seconds and H is the height in feet. Find the maximum height of a drive. (hint: where does the maximum occur on a parabola?)

Answer 1

The given quadratic function

$H=-16t^2+144t$

Describes the height, in feet, of one of Tiger Woods's drives with respect to the time, t, measure in seconds.

The function is a parabola, to determine its maximum point, the first step is to determine if the parabola opens up or down, to do so you have to look at the sign of the coefficient of the quadratic term (a).

-If a>0, the parabola opens up, and its vertex will indicate the minimum value of the funtion.

-Id

For this function, the coefficient is a= -16, the coefficient "a" is negative, which