Leaving Certificate Physical Education Practice Test

Velocity describes how fast something is moving and in what direction. Speed alone only tells you how fast, without any information about direction, so it’s a scalar. Velocity combines both magnitude and direction, making it a vector quantity. That’s why it’s the term used for the speed of an object in a specific direction. For example, a car moving at 30 m/s north has a velocity of 30 m/s north. Acceleration, by contrast, is about how velocity changes over time, not the current motion itself, and momentum is mass times velocity, a measure of motion, not the directional speed alone.