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It depends what you are measuring the speed of.

The best-known way to measure speed is to divide the distance travelled by the time taken. If a 20km trip takes 1 hour and 15 minutes (1.25 hours), then the speed is 20/1.25 = 16 km/h.

In any vehicle with wheels (car, bicycle, train), the distance can be found by counting the turns of the wheel. The speedometer is calibrated to show the speed.

A GPS calculates the distance travelled by measuring the distances between a series of points on the ground (The location of these points is established from satellite signals). Speed is then calculated from the time taken between each pair of points.

In an aircraft, speed is measured by a small tube pointed forward, called a pitot tube. The higher the air pressure in this tube, the greater the speed shown by the airspeed indicator. The vertical speed indicatormeasures the difference in the outside air pressure, which decreases with altitude.

In a boat the pitometer log operates on the same principle as an airspeed indicator, but with water instead of air.

All of these methods measure the speed with which you are moving. What if you want to measure the speed of something else?

A radar gun is used by police to catch speeders. It can also be used to tell the speed of a Baseball pitch or a tennis serve. It works on the Doppler effect: the frequency of the reflected radio waves goes up with increasing speed. The distance to a galaxy is related to its red shift(also a result of the Doppler effect) which shows the speed with which the galaxy is moving away from us.

The speed of a moving fluid can be measured by a propeller. An anemometer measures wind speed, and a velocimeter measures the speed of a stream.

Then again, you might want to measure the download speed of your internet connection, or the velocity of circulation of money, or . . .

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11y ago

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