Prompt:
write a 300 word scene in which you take a concept you are unfamiliar with and
combine it with something you are very familiar and comfortable with. I chose
to combine math and colorguard.
“Dammit! I HATE THIS!”
A
mechanical pencil flew across the room. Cora sat up in surprise, suddenly
afraid for her health. She twisted in her seat and saw Jessica glaring at her
paper.
“Um,”
she paused as Jessica turned to her. “Do you want help?”
“Nothing
will make this make sense! Chuck Norris could do this and it wouldn’t make
sense!” she growled.
Cora
grinned. “Simple projectile motion’s not that bad. It’s a graph, and the arc is
tracing a parabolic shape on it, right?” Jessica looked back at her blankly. “Kinda
like a frowny face?”
She still stared. Cora sighed, but smiled after a moment
of thought. “You’re in colorguard, right? You spin rifles?”
“Only all the time.”
“Okay,
so imagine you’re throwing –“
“TOSSING.”
“
– tossing your rifle to a teammate a few feet to your right. The rifle represents
the line on the graph that is you and your teammate.”
Jessica looked at her strangely, but nodded.
“So, the rifle is tossed in an arc. X represents the
horizontal component of the rifle’s movement and is being graphed against Time,
and they’re directly proportional and increase with a constant ratio.”
“Unless
it’s super windy,” Jessica muttered.
Cora
rolled her eyes. “The rifle goes up and comes back down, so Y is negative and
exponential. But it needs to have a positive initial velocity, which is how
hard you have to toss the rifle. Do you get it?”
“So…what you’re saying is…the quad I toss to Selina can
be separated into horizontal and vertical components. The horizontal line is
linear and the vertical line is exponential, because it moves up and down,”
Jessica recited slowly.
“Yeah! You got it!” Cora’s eyes lit up, excited.
“YEAH! High-five!” Jessica smiled back. “Thanks, dude.
You should try spinning sometime.”
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