© 2026 LearnInShort
Motion is the first chapter of physics and the one that keeps coming back — as a definition question in a General Science paper, as a two-line numerical in SSC, as a graph in Railways. Candidates lose marks here not because the physics is hard but because they never separated four words that sound like pairs: distance and displacement, speed and velocity.
The whole chapter runs on one idea. Distance and speed only care how much ground you covered. Displacement and velocity also care which way you ended up. That single difference decides whether a runner who finishes one lap of a track has travelled 400 metres or zero.
After that come three equations and two graphs. The three equations handle every numerical where acceleration stays constant. The two graphs are answered by exactly two words — slope and area. Ten minutes here is worth four to six marks in almost every paper you will sit.
1. An athlete runs exactly one complete lap of a circular track of radius r and stops where he started. What are the distance covered and the displacement?
2. A car covers a certain distance at 60 km/h and returns along the same road at 40 km/h. Its average speed for the whole journey is:
3. A body starts from rest and moves with a uniform acceleration of 2 m/s². How far does it travel in the first 5 seconds?
4. The slope of a velocity–time graph represents:
5. A ball is thrown vertically upward. At the highest point of its path, its velocity and acceleration respectively are:
6. The area enclosed under a velocity–time graph and the time axis gives:
7. The distance–time graph of a body is a straight line parallel to the time axis. The body is:
8. A stone is dropped from rest and falls freely for 3 seconds. Taking g = 10 m/s², the distance it falls is: