What is sound? What is the speed of Sound? How does sound travel? Explain?

  WHAT IS SOUND? WHAT IS THE SPEED OF SOUND? HOW DOES SOUND TRAVEL? EXPLAIN?

Sound

       When someone shouts “hello”, billions of molecules push and shove through the crowded air between you, speeding the sound to your ears. If we could watch this happen, we’d see that sounds are waves of energy that squeeze and stretch the air as they travel.

        All sounds travel in waves, and what makes one sound different from another is simply the shape of its waves. Unlike waves on water, which waves on water, which snake up and down as they move forward, sound waves push and pull in the same direction that they travel.

       Sound is ultimately just another type of energy, like light or heat, but it’s special to us because it carries words and music at high speed. Without sound, we wouldn’t be able to listen to birds singing in the trees or the latest pop songs on the radio. It has the ability to affect our emotions and stir up our interest in the world around us.

Speed of Sound

       We see lightning flash several seconds before we hear thunderclaps because light travels much faster than sound. At ground level, at an air temperature of about 20 degrees Celsius (68 degrees F), sound travels at 343 meters per second (1235 kph or 768 mph).

How sound travels 

       If you bang a drum, its skin vibrates, shaking the air molecules around it. These push on nearby molecules, which shake others, and the sound quickly ripples outwards, spreading energy in all directions. When the energy finally reaches our ears, it makes the air inside them vibrate too and we hear sounds.