NAME DATE BAND

THE ROAD TRIP REPRISE1

CALCULUS | PACKER COLLEGIATE INSTITUTE

At the start of the year, we thought about a roadtrip. And using some information from
the odometer and the clock, we starting thinking about velocity in a deep way. We first
came up with the idea of using Ddistance / Dtime to be our ARoC. And we saw that making
the time interval smaller and smaller, we got a really really good approximation for how
fast we were going at that tiny moment in time (a good approximation for the IRoC).

Now we’re going to do the backwards thing. Instead of using the odometer (and clock) to
figure out what the speedometer of a car would read, we’re going to use the
speedometer (and clock) to figure out what the odometer will say.

Alex is driving to his Ultimate Frisbee tournament. And here’s the data we collected
about his trip:

Time 7:00 7:03 7:05 7:10 7:11 7:14 7:20 7:22

Speed 0 47 67 70 68 38 12 0
(mph)

Alex got to his destination at 7:22.

(a) Approximately how far did Alex drive between 7:10 and 7:11?

(b) Approximately how far did he go total? (Come up with a reasonable answer, based on
the data you have!)

(b) Why is this an approximation?

(c) What more information could you have that would make your estimation even better?

1
Inspired by the work of Brett Parker
1
Okay, you wanted it? You got it, frands!

Time 7:00 7:01 7:02 7:03 7:04 7:05 7:06 7:07 7:08 7:09 7:10
Spee 0 12 37 47 50 67 72 70 70 71 70
d

7:11 7:12 7:13 7:14 7:15 7:16 7:17 7:18 7:19 7:20 7:21 7:22
68 50 40 37 35 38 30 20 20 12 5 0

Here’s a graph in case it is helpful!

Approximately how far did Alex drive, based on this additional data?