In physics, when you break a vector into its parts, those parts are called its COMPONENTS. For example, in the vector (4, 1), the x-axis (HORIZONTAL) component is 4, and the y-axis (vertical) component is 1. Typically, a physics problem gives you an angle and a magnitude to define a vector; you have to find the components yourself using a little trigonometry.Suppose you know that a ball is rolling on a flat table at 15 degrees from a direction PARALLEL to the bottom EDGE at a speed of 7.0 meters/second. You may want to find out how long the ball will TAKE to roll off the edge 1.0 meter to the right.image0.jpgDefine your axes so the ball is at the origin initially and the x-axis is parallel to the bottom edge of the table (refer to the figure). Therefore, the problem breaks down to finding out how long the ball will take to roll 1.0 meter in the x direction. To find the time, you first need to know how fast the ball is moving in the x direction.The problem tells you that the ball is rolling at a speed of 7.0 meters/second at 15 degrees to the horizontal (along the positive x-axis), which is a vector: 7.0 meters/second at 15 degrees gives you both a magnitude and a direction. What you have here is a velocity — the vector version of speed. The ball’s speed is the magnitude of its velocity vector, and when you include a direction to that speed, you get the velocity vector v.To find out how fast the ball is traveling toward the table edge, you need not the ball’s total speed but the x component of the ball’s velocity. The x component is a scalar (a number, not a vector), and you write it like this: vx. The y component of the ball’s velocity vector is vy. Therefore, you can say thatv = (vx, vy)That’s how you express breaking a vector up into its components. So what’s vx here? And for that matter, what’s vy, the y component of the velocity? The vector has a length (7.0 meters/second) and a direction