Air Resistance

I chose this picture of a sailboat that I took this past summer in Sweden for my blog because it’s the perfect example of what air resistance can do. If the wind is against the sailboat, air resistance prevents it from moving any further and vice versa if the wind is with the sailboat. However, the event I want to talk about took place a few days ago. I was walking with my friends, and it was really windy and the wind was against us. Yet again, physics popped into my head. It seemed like it was taking us a long time to walk to Jamba Juice because of the strong winds. Because the winds were so strong, it created a lot of air resistance, otherwise known as “drag”, which was keeping us from going very fast. On the way back, I noticed that it seemed like a shorter walk even though we walked the same distance as we did on the way there. This was because we weren’t experiencing as much air resistance since the wind was with us on the way back. This experience helped me to realize the effects of air resistance. I figured out that air resistance is basically the force that opposes the motion of an object. In this case, the air resistance was caused by the wind, so the wind was creating a force on my friends and me. We were having trouble walking as fast as we normally do because of the drag force acting against us, or air resistance.