in today's video we're going to look at the difference between scalar and vector quantities which can also be called scalars and vectors scalars are physical quantities that only have a magnitude but no direction and remember magnitude is just another way of saying size and so it can be measured with a numerical value for example if a car travels at 22 meters per second 22 would be the magnitude of the speed and because speed by itself doesn't have a direction we consider it a scalar quantity other scalar quantities include things like distance mass temperature and time although there are loads more vectors on the other hand have both a magnitude and a direction these include things like velocity displacement acceleration force and momentum we take a closer look at each of these quantities in other videos though so don't worry if you're not sure what any of them are just yet to help you understand the difference between scalars and vectors imagine you start at this point a and you walk a distance of three kilometers depending on which way you set off you could end up anywhere on the circumference of this circle this is because distance doesn't actually give us any idea of the direction which is why it's a scalar quantity however if you'd started at a and then told us that you walked three kilometers east we'd know exactly where you ended up because you gave the exact displacement which is a vector quantity because it has both a magnitude of three kilometers and the direction of east in order to represent vectors we use arrows with the length of the arrow indicating the magnitude of the vector and which way is pointing indicating the direction so four kilometers north would look like this whereas two kilometers west would be like this because it's pointing to the left and it's only half the size of the four kilometer one we can also have negative vectors for example if we just had these two arrows we could label our two kilometer west one as minus two kilometers east instead because it's effectively backwards in the east direction anyway that's everything for this video so hope you found it useful if you did then give us a like and subscribe and we'll see you next time