n example of a situation that I might be able to use an equation with a single unknown would be, suppose I live in a town 100 miles away from my office. How long will it take me to reach my office if I am driving at 75 mph. Time will be unknown, and I am assuming I am driving at a constant speed, so I will apply the following linear equation, Speed = Time Distance → Time = Spee
Can you set up equations with variables for the two cases described?
An example of a situation that I might be able to use an equation with a single unknown would be, suppose I live in a town 100 miles away from my office. How long will it take me to reach my office if I am driving at 75 mph. Time will be unknown, and I am assuming I am driving at a constant speed, so I will apply the following linear equation, Speed = Time Distance → Time = Speed Distance = 1.33hours = 1 hour 20 minutes. Now I'm in the same position as before, but now there are traffic jams, or maybe roadwork, so the speed is not constant, (it varies with time) so in this case speed(time) = time distance → time = speed(time) Distance will therefore fail in this case. In the first case, in the linear case, we can assume that the speed will be constant and independent of other variables, time, which makes the linear method useful in this situation. On the other hand, in our second example, speed is a function of time (our unknown), and also, we may be unable to understand how speed changes with time, so in this case, the linear method will fail, because we are unable to predict the future behavior of our motion.
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