Topic 5 - forces

Question 1

How does a falling parachutist reach terminal velocity (5marks)

Answer 1

At first , when the parachutist has just jumped out the plane he is accelerating due to weight being higher than the air resistance but then as his velocity increases air resistance increases until both forces are equal , at this point the parachutist is neither accelerating nor decelerating - leading to them at a terminal velocity
Then once the parachute is deployed , the air resistance significantly increases due to the sudden increase in surface area and then they accelerate upwards, after this the weight becomes equal to the air resistance and at this point the parachutist has reached a new terminal velocity

Question 2

what is inertial mass

Answer 2

inertial mass is a measure of how difficult it is to change the velocity of an object and inertial mass is defined as the ratio of force over acceleration