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

So instead of seconds squared, think of it as an increase in (meters per second) per second. So every second its speed is increasing. That’s acceleration.

If you are going a constant speed, then if you draw a graph of your distance from the starting point, it would be a line at an angle, something like Y = X.

However, if you are accelerating, your distance from the starting part increases exponentially, like the right side of a parabola.