What is vector quantity?

What is vector quantity?

Physical quantities which need both magnitude and direction to be fully expressed are called vector quantities. Displacement, velocity, acceleration, force, electric intensity etc are the examples of vector quantities.

A vector quantity is a physical quantity that has both magnitude and direction. This means that in order to fully describe a vector quantity, you need to know both how big it is and which way it's pointing.

For example, imagine you're describing the movement of a car. You could say that it's going 50 miles per hour, but that doesn't tell you the whole story. You also need to know which direction the car is moving in (north, south, east, west, etc.). So, velocity is a vector quantity.

Some other examples of vector quantities include:

  • Displacement: This is the change in position of an object. It's different from distance, which is just the total length of the path the object takes.
  • Force: This is a push or pull that can cause an object to accelerate.
  • Acceleration: This is the rate at which an object's velocity is changing.
  • Momentum: This is the product of an object's mass and velocity.

Vector quantities are often represented by arrows. The length of the arrow represents the magnitude of the quantity, and the direction of the arrow represents the direction of the quantity.

Vector quantities can be added and subtracted using a variety of methods, such as the head-to-tail method or the parallelogram method.

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