Kinematics....

In Section 4A we learned that mechanics (the study of motion) can be broken down into three categories: Kinematics  (the description of how things move), Dynamics (the description of what causes things to move), and statics (the description of how stationary things react to pushes and pulls--stationary being the key word here).

Section 4B introduces us to Kinematics or the description of how things move by measuring positions, speed or velocity, and acceleration of the objects being observed. Let's deal with the objects position to start with. This leads us to the difference between distance and displacement. Distance is a scalar quantity where you take the individual lengths in your trip and add them up to get a total. On the other hand, displacement is a vector quantity is measured as the shortest distance between where you started from to where you ended at. Looking at this mathematically, distance uses addition of the total lengths involved in the motion while displacement deals with the difference from the start to the finish. Calculating these two is described in the video below.