{"id":25928,"date":"2017-10-23T10:50:41","date_gmt":"2017-10-23T16:50:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rankexploits.com\/musings\/?p=25928"},"modified":"2017-10-23T10:50:41","modified_gmt":"2017-10-23T16:50:41","slug":"puzzled-over-physics-homework","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rankexploits.com\/musings\/2017\/puzzled-over-physics-homework\/","title":{"rendered":"Puzzled over physics homework&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>New threads are useful.  Since I&#8217;m still not doing climate analyses, I might as well comment on a homework-grammar thingie that&#8217;s been puzzling me.  I&#8217;ve noticed that tons and tons of physics homeword problems use this sort of construction: &#8220;Would would be the &#8216;x&#8217; of &#8230;.&#8221; Here&#8217;s a few examples I got by googling [&#8220;what would be&#8221; speed]:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>What would be the speed of boxes&#8230;.?<\/li>\n<li>What would be the speed of the following particles if they had the same wavelength &#8230;?<\/li>\n<li>What would be the speed and acceleration of an square iron plate with an area of &#8230;.?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Whenever I read that, I think &#8220;What gives?&#8221;  Those all sound so stilted to me. I <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>What would the speed of the boxes be &#8230;.?<\/li>\n<li>What would the speed of the following particles be if they had the same wavelength &#8230;?<\/li>\n<li>What would the speed and acceleration of an square iron plate with an area of ..be ..?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I&#8217;ve seen the &#8220;what would be..&#8221; construction in physics problems so often, I started to try to think of non-physics sentences where I might use it. Try as I might, I find construction nearly always sounds odd to me.  I don&#8217;t go around saying &#8220;What would be the price of eggs if&#8230;.&#8221; or &#8220;What would be the girl&#8217;s SAT score &#8230; &#8221; or &#8220;What would be my weight if I stopped snarfing a chocolate bar every time I went to the grocery store?&#8221;  <\/p>\n<p>So, I ask you: &#8220;What would be your opinion on this grammatical construction?&#8221; Feel free to give opinions on other matters too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>New threads are useful. Since I&#8217;m still not doing climate analyses, I might as well comment on a homework-grammar thingie that&#8217;s been puzzling me. I&#8217;ve noticed that tons and tons of physics homeword problems use this sort of construction: &#8220;Would would be the &#8216;x&#8217; of &#8230;.&#8221; Here&#8217;s a few examples I got by googling [&#8220;what &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/rankexploits.com\/musings\/2017\/puzzled-over-physics-homework\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Puzzled over physics homework&#8230;<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25928","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-random"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rankexploits.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25928","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rankexploits.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rankexploits.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rankexploits.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rankexploits.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25928"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rankexploits.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25928\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rankexploits.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25928"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rankexploits.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25928"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rankexploits.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25928"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}