We will begin our study of motion by examining the motion of a body in 1-dimension, i.e. translation in a straight line. More complicated motion problems will be examined later in other chapters.
V avg is a vector.
Rt, where the rate R actually represents average velocity. Suppose we want to know the instantaneous velocity of the object at the specific instant t 1 . Isaac Newton and other mathematicians argued that to make this calculation of instantaneous velocity, all one had to do is to calculate the average velocity V avg over smaller and smaller time intervals. Thus, instantaneous velocity is the first derivative of position with respect to time. Velocity V is a vector quantity.