Afire engine is moving south at 35 m/s while blowing its siren at a frequency of 400 hz.
what pitch will the passengers in a car that has already passed the fire engine hear if the car is traveling north at 18 m/s?
use 343 m/s for the speed of sound.

To solve this problem we will apply the concepts related to the Doppler effect. The Doppler effect is the change in the perceived frequency of any wave movement when the emitter, or focus of waves, and the receiver, or observer, move relative to each other. Mathematically it can be described as

Here,

=frequency received by detector

=frequency of wave emitted by source

=velocity of detector

=velocity of source

v=velocity of sound wave

Replacing we have that,

Therefore the frequencty that will hear the passengers is 422Hz

the velocity you are looking for is made up of two parts: horizontally velocity, vh, and its vertical velocity, vv. the actual velocity of the ball will be these two parts added together, and because velocity is a vector then they will need to be added vectorially.  

neglecting air resistance etc etc.,  

the horizontal velocity component will be constant (because there is no accelerating force in the horizontal direction.  

vh = 8 ms-1  

the vertical velocity component has an accelerating force: 'g'.  

using v = u +at where a = g = 9.81 ms-2.  

the vertical component of velocity, vv = 0 + gt = vv =9.81 x 2  

vv = 19.62 ms-1 . the zero appears because the virtical component of velocity at time t=0 is zero. remember, the ball was thrown horizontally.  

how fast it will be moving (it actual path (being a parabola )) will be the vector sum of these two.  

adding vectorally gives: -  

v = sqr root (8^2 + 19.62^2) = sqr root(64+384.9) = 21.18 or 21.2 ms-1