somebody explain the idea of acceleration units to me. The whole “seconds squared” or “seconds per second” makes no sense to me.

Question

Like if a car starts at rest and moves at 4m/s^2 for 10seconds, what does that mean?

Does it mean the car is exponentially increasing in speed? Can someone draw it out for me second by second?

Edit:
***I have a follow up question to several of y’all’s responses in how the concept of acceleration relates to one of the big kinematics equations as well. That’s one of the big discrepancies I’m having trouble understanding***

In: 9

Answer 1

Acceleration measures how fast velocity or speed are changing (velocity is speed in a certain direction, speed doesn’t care about direction).

In your specific example, the car’s acceleration is increasing its speed by 4metres per second every second.

As you noted it starts from rest, this means after 1 second it is moving at 4m/s, after 2 seconds it’s moving at 8m/s and so on up to the 10 second mark where it is moving at 40m/s.