Question

What is the formula for distance?

Answer 1

Hint: We come across innumerable moving bodies around us in our everyday life. Even the Earth is a moving body with respect to the Sun. Thus, we shall make use of the formula for speed of a moving body to obtain the formula for distance covered by that moving with that particular speed in a fixed time interval.

Complete answer:
The distance travelled by a moving body is the total length of its journey or the total length of the path travelled by it.
The most important aspect about a moving body is that it definitely covers some distance during its time of travel. However, another interesting fact is that even though the moving body has been covering a finite distance, its displacement can be zero.
For any body in motion, the formula for the speed of the body is given as:
$s=\dfrac{d}{t}$
Where,
$s=$ speed of the body
$d=$ distance covered by the body during its journey
$t=$ time taken by the body to complete its journey
We shall modify this formula by cross-multiplying the terms on the left hand side and right hand side to obtain the formula for the distance covered by a moving body.
$\Rightarrow s\times t=d$
$\Rightarrow d=s\times t$
Thus, the distance covered by a moving body is given as the product of the speed of the body and the time taken by the body to complete its journey.
Therefore, the distance of a body in motion is equal to $speed\times time$.

Note:
We must also know that the displacement of a moving body is the measurement of the net path covered by the body. The displacement of a body depends only on the starting point and the ending point of the journey of the body irrespective of the path it has travelled to reach the ending point of its journey from the starting point.