Can an object be increasing in speed as its acceleration decreases?
Yes, an object can increase in speed and decrease in acceleration.In fact, this is normally the case whenever you get moving in a car.Say you are starting up from a stop light in your car (for simplicity assume you have an automatic transmission). If you push the gas pedal part way down and hold it in the same position, then the car will start out at its maximum acceleration. The faster the car goes, the less the acceleration will be.You can feel this yourself. If you are going slow (say under 20 mph) and push the gas pedal all the way down, you will feel your self being pushed back into the seat (unless you have a very low powered car). Now when you are traveling fast (maybe 60 mph) and you do the same thing, you will notice you are not pushed back in the seat as hard (unless you have a very high powered car). How hard you are pushed back in the seat is a measure of how fast you are accelerating. At the higher speed your acceleration is less. If you just held the pedal all the way down from 20 to 60 the same thing would happen. That is, the acceleration would be less at 60 than at 20, but because of the way the body reacts to acceleration, it is harder to tell that the acceleration is decreasing slowly as the speed increases.Or, a similar but more quantitative experiment you can do in your car is: With the same gas pedal position, measure how long it takes to go (accelerate) from 10 to 20 mph 20 to 30, 30 to 40, 40 to 50, and then from 50 to 60 mph. You will find that each higher 10 mph takes longer. Acceleration is defined as how fast your speed (in a vector form) is changing. So, you can see that your acceleration is less at higher speeds because it is taking longer to get the same change in speed.
