Quote:
Originally posted by Carbonated_Brains
Wave def'n: A disturbance traveling through a medium by which energy is transferred from one particle of the medium to another without causing any permanent displacement of the medium itself.
Just to be anal  it's not a wave, because the cars (the medium) are moving permanently down the line. For it to be a wave, and it would be a longitudinal wave because you're describing compressions and rarefactions, the cars would have to drive forward, shift into reverse, and repeat!
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The highway is the medium, the cars are the particles.
Actually this is exactly analogous to sound waves. Sound consists of layers of greater and lesser compression in the air.