Practice question · Multiple choice
Your car’s speedometer reads 60 km/h at this instant. Which calculus statement matches that reading?
Hints
- The speedometer does not know your trip history or future, it reports a property of this instant.
- An instantaneous rate is a limit of ever-shorter average speeds: distance over duration as the duration shrinks to nothing.
Show the answer
C. The derivative of position with respect to time
Why
The speedometer is a physical derivative-meter: it shows the limit of over vanishing intervals. Averages need a whole interval; the derivative compresses that idea into a single instant.
Practise Derivatives as local rate of change
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