Re: HSC 2014 4U Marathon - Advanced Level
Here's a follow up question.
A clock has an hour-hand of 3 units and a minute-hand of 4 units. If the hands are currently positioned at three-o'-clock, determine the first time when the tips of the hands are moving away from each other the fastest
This is a bit tedious, so I won't include every detail, but I think this is right.
We can write the two hands endpoints in polar coordinates as
As the hands have constant angular speeds, and hand 2 is moving faster, the first time the tips are moving away the fastest will occur when
We write
for brevity. (This is the angle between hands, offset by a constant factor of
.)
If x is the separating distance, we have (using the cosine rule),
Differentiating twice using the chain rule we get
and
Now, at the time of interest, x'' vanishes, so plugging the expression for the first derivative of x into the second equation and simplifying we get
Use the Pythagorean identity to put everything in terms of sin(x), and factorise the resulting quadratic to get.
Since
must lie in one of the second two quadrants (*), this gives
(Here t is the number of hours elapsed since the starting time of 3:00.)