Part A
Suppose you are throwing a baseball. You release the ball with a perfectly horizontal velocity of 5.0 m/s at a height of 1.5 m above the ground. How far will the ball travel horizontally from the instant it leaves your hand until the instant it first contacts the ground?
System: The ball will be treated as a point particle subject to an influence from the earth (gravity).
Models: The ball is in projectile motion, so we model the x-component of the ball's motion as One-Dimensional Motion with Constant Velocity and the y-component as One-Dimensional Motion with Constant Acceleration.
Approach: The first thing to do is to sketch the situation, which allows us to summarize the givens and unknowns and also to set up a coordinate system.