What is the definition of average speed?

Question

I am defining words for my science class... I have defined the term speed but average speed is also one of my words... I am not quite sure what average speed is... or what the difference between speed or average speed is...

Answer 1

There is an important difference

Speed is how fast you are at a certain moment. When you drive to school, sometimes you are stopped at a traffic light sometimes your driving 65 on the freeway. So your speed is typically changing and not the same the whole drive.

Average speed, is merely how long distance you drove, divided by how much time it took. You ignore the instantaneous speeds during the drive.

So you could say my average speed was 35mph while you had a peak speed of 65 and a low speed of 0.

Answer 2

Average Speed Definition

Answer 3

Speed is how fast you're going at any given time.

Average speed: You measure how far something travels in 'X' number of hours, (or minutes or seconds).
You then divide the distance travelled by the time taken.

e.g. you travel from home to visit a friend, a distance of 130 km (or miles) and it takes you 2.5 hours.
130 ÷ 2.5 = 52 kph (mph) average speed..

If the next day, you do the same journey in 1¾ hrs (1.75hrs),
What do you think your average speed is ?

Answer 4

average speed is like speed ... it is a scalar quantity (meaning it only has magnitude and not direction) and it is equal to distance over time ... not to be confused with velocity which is displacement over time ... the only difference between average speed and speed is that when working with average speed ... you could be working with more than one speed for different periods of time ... which means you would have to find total distance by multiplying each speed by the time interval it occupies ... adding them each together... then divide by the total time

Answer 5

You add the highest speed and the lowest speed, then divide it by 2. That is the average speed.