Ferris Wheel
This lesson unit is intended to help you assess how well students are able to:
- Model a periodic situation, the height of a person on a Ferris wheel, using trigonometric functions.
- Interpret the constants a, b, c in the formula in terms of the physical situation, where h is the height of the person above the ground and t is the elapsed time.
- What is the radius of the Ferris Wheel?
- How high is the person when she is in the bottom car?
- When t = 4, what is the height of the passenger on the red car? How do you know?
- How long does it take for the wheel to complete one turn? How does your graph show the rate of rotation?
- Which quantities vary as the Ferris Wheel turns? Which measures do not vary?
- What does a represent?
- What does b represent?
- What does c represent?