You have learned about the safety features that roads are designed with to try to prevent accidents. You also have learned about the science of the movement of vehicles involved in collisions. In this activity, you will learn about the effects a collision can have on the occupants of the vehicles.

In a cartoon, you may have seen a character run off a cliff and as soon as the character looks down, he or she plummets to the ground.

 Although cartoon characters usually seem to survive these accidents, you know that in real life, you would likely be dead from a fall off a 15-metre cliff. What would kill you? If you said the fall you are not entirely correct. It would not be the fall, but the stop that kills.

Similarly, when a car moves at the posted speed limit and crashes into something, it hits that object with a lot of force. Any person in the vehicle not wearing a seat belt will hit the windshield with the same type of force that the person might experience falling off a cliff.

 Although the first collision can be expensive to repair, the second and third collisions are actually far more serious because they result in people being injured or killed.

Again, Newton's laws explain these collisions. An object in motion tends to stay in motion unless it is acted on by an outside force. That is what is happening in each of the three collisions:

• The car stops when it collides with another object.

• The passenger's body continues moving until it collides with another object (the windshield, for example).

•  The internal organs in the passenger's body continue to move until they collide with other organs or bones inside the body.

Therefore, a collision is quite complex. In fact, a vehicle accident has a series of collisions that make up the entire accident.