Exactly one kilometres from Quiz Master Shop Towers a Drop Tower fairground ride has been put up. Detonator at Thorpe Park is a Drop Tower. People on the ride are dropped under freefall and then decelerated at he bottom.
We have taken to watching the ride in idle moments and we have noticed that we start to hear the screams just as the ride starts to decelerate near the bottom.
So the question is, how high is the freefall part of the ride?
The first thing to work out is the time that it takes the screams to travel from the ride to us.
The speed of sound is 343 metres per second, so the sound takes about 2.9 seconds to travel the kilometre to reach us.
There is an equation S equals UT plus a half AT squared, where s is the distance, u the initial velocity, a is acceleration and t is time.
The initial velocity is zero, so we can ignore that.
Acceleration due to gravity is 9.81 metres per second per second.
And we have calculated the time to be 2.9 seconds.
Plugging these numbers into the equation gives us a height of 42 metres or 135 feet.