Question

State whether given statement is, true or false: The displacement of body has the same direction as that of its average velocity.
A. True
B. False

Answer 1

Hint:In order to solve this question we need to understand between distance and displacement. Distance is total path length covered by particles and it is non conservative whereas displacement is shortest path length between initial and final points and it only depends on initial and final point, so if you start from one point to get to the same point after some time then distance is non zero but displacement is zero.

Complete answer:
As stated displacement is the shortest path or mathematically it is the vector distance between two points. Also velocity is defined as displacement per unit time from initial to final point but average velocity is average of all velocities of a motion, so in this case we average all directions and hence in general it cannot be said that average velocity is in direction of displacement but the velocity alone is in direction of displacement.

So the correct option is B.

Note: It should be remembered that displacement is a vector quantity while distance is scalar quantity. So displacement has some direction in addition to magnitude while distance has only magnitude. So velocity is also a vector quantity so if average velocity is to be found out then we add all vectors by the law of vector addition either triangle law or parallelogram law of vector addition. The average speed is found by scalar addition of all speeds.