Waves: Distance?

Question

At a fireworks celebration on the 4th, you notice a flash from a cherry bomb and .50 seconds later you hear a sound of the acoustic pulse from the explosion. The speed of sound waves in air is about 343 m/s while that of light is about 3.0 x 10^8 m/s. What was the distance between you and the explosion?

Answer 1

This is very simple, given two parameters time and speed, we can easily calculate the distance using the equation,

d = vt

where v is the velocity or speed, d is the distance and t is the time in seconds. So for the speed of sound it would be, 171.5 meters and for the speed of light it would be, 150000000 meters. Now the answers are not the same because light did not take the same time as sound. Given the high speed of light, it is instantaneous. Thus just use the speed of sound to calculate the distance.