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Physics for Kids4 chapters | 67 lessons
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Binish has internship field work experience in classroom guidance lessons as a Professional School Counselor and has a Master's of Education in School Counseling.
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Have you ever wondered how a car takes you from one place to another? You might sit in a car to be driven to school, the park, or even your friend's house. Every car has an engine under the hood. An engine is a machine that uses many different parts to convert fuel into energy, or power. An engine creates enough power to make the car move.
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Just like how our stomachs need food to keep us alive, most car engines need gasoline to turn on and work. If we were to look inside a car's engine, we would see cylinder shapes. Each one of these cylinders has many parts to it, such as pistons and spark plugs, to name a couple.
The piston's function is to move up and down. By making this motion, the piston is able to drag a mixture of gasoline and air into the cylinder and then push it back up toward the spark plug.
The spark plug's function is to burn the mixture of gasoline and air when it reaches the spark plug. The burning causes the mixture to expand and push back down on the piston. When the spark plug expands the mixture and pushes down on the piston, the piston pushes back up again and sends the mixture out of the cylinder and into the engine. This process creates energy, which the engine uses to power the car.
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Think of this process as a friendly game of Hot Potato. The object of this game is to throw a ball back and forth between players until time is up. The player left holding the ball at the end is out. If we think of this process as a game of Hot Potato between the piston and the spark plug, then the piston and the spark plug act as the players, and the mixture of gasoline and air act as the ball.
The ball starts off with the piston who passes it to the spark plug. The spark plug doesn't want the ball and throws it back to the piston. The piston doesn't want the ball either and, therefore, throws it out of the cylinder! In this case, nobody loses the game. Instead, both the piston and the spark plug have worked together to create energy.
An engine is a machine that makes a car move, and a car's engine has cylinders. The many parts of a cylinder, such as the pistons and the spark plugs, use the fuel from gasoline and the pressure of the air to work together and create the energy that powers a car.
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Physics for Kids4 chapters | 67 lessons
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