Honors Physics
North Allegheny School District
Final Review Questions
Mr. Neff
Unit 0−Basics
1. What is physics; what does it study; what is its goal?
2. What is an idea’s progression from becoming a fact to a law or fact to a theory?
3. What is the difference between observations and inferences?
4. What is the scientific method; who uses it; what does it say about science?
5. What make a hypothesis scientific; why is this important?
6. How can you tell how many significant digits a number has?
7. What is the difference between accuracy and precision?
8. What are the rules for doing math with significant digits?
9. What three things should be considered when using a ruler (the yes/no’s)
10. What is interpolation? What is extrapolation? Which is better and why?
Unit 1-Linear Motion
11. What is a rate? What keyword is often a tip-off that you are dealing with a rate?
12. Compare and contrast scalars and vectors
13. Why is it that an object can accelerate while traveling at constant speed, but not at constant velocity?
14. Compare and contrast speed and velocity.
15. Calculate the average speed of a cheetah who runs 140 meters in 5 seconds.
16. What is constant velocity?
17. Compare and contrast distance and displacement.
18. What does a displacement time graph look like for:
a. no motion
b. slow forward motion
c. fast forward motion
d. slow backward motion
e. fast backward motion
f. positive acceleration (2 types)
g. negative acceleration (2 types)
19. How does a distance time graph differ from a displacement time graph?
20. Draw a velocity time graph for:
- no motion
- slow forward motion
- fast forward motion
- slow backward motion
- fast backward motion
- positive acceleration (2 types)
- negative acceleration (2 types)
21. How do you know acceleration when you see it?
22. Calculate the acceleration of a car that can go from rest to 100 km/hr in 10 seconds.
23. What three equations relate acceleration, change in velocity, time, and displacement?
24. Calculate the instantaneous speed of a car at the 10 second mark if it’s acceleration is 2 m/s/s from rest. Do this two different ways-one with an equation, and one with a chart.
25. What conditions are necessary for free fall? How often does this really happen on Earth?
26. What is the acceleration of a freely falling object?
27. Calculate the instantaneous speed and distance fallen for an object that falls freely from rest for 8 seconds.
28. If a freely falling rock were equipped with an odometer, would the readings for distance fallen each second increase, decrease, or stay the same? Justify your answer with a numeric example.
29. A ball is thrown straight up. What will be the instantaneous velocity at the top of its path? What will be its acceleration at the top? What mistake would a non-physics type make here?
30. Where does air resistance come from?
31. Compare and contrast the sky diving experiences of a small girl and a portly man.
Unit 2: 2-D Motion
32. If Force A is pushing to the right at 6.0 Newtons, and Force B is pushing to the left with 8.0 Newtons, what will the resultant force be?
33. If Force A is pushing to the right at 6.0 Newtons, and Force B is pushing up with 8.0 Newtons, what will the resultant force be?
34. If you are standing on a train moving forward at 40 mph. Normally, you can throw a baseball at a speed of 50 mph. If you throw a baseball forward, what will its velocity be with respect to the train? With respect to the ground? How about if you throw it backwards?
35. What are vector components?
36. If a projectile is launched horizontally from a height of 15.0 meters with an initial velocity of 5.0 m/s, what is its range?
37. What if the projectile above were launched 15 degrees above the horizontal?
38. Why should a hunter aim right at a monkey in a tree?
Unit 3: Force and Motion
39. What did Aristotle think about motion?
40. What did Copernicus say about motion?
41. What did Galileo think about Aristotelian physics?
42. What is inertia? Who coined this term?
43. What objects have inertia?
44. Does the Law of Inertia pertain to moving objects or resting objects? Does it require force to keep something moving?
45. Why is it necessary to keep pedaling a bicycle?
46. When you flip a coin in a car, why doesn’t the coin just slam into the back of the car?
47. Compare and contrast mass and weight.
48. If an elephant and mouse were moving toward you in gravity-free space, would they both bump into you with the same effect? Explain.
49. What is net force? What diagram helps you find net force?
50. What does equilibrium mean?
51. What is an equilibrant?
52. What is a normal force? Why is it called this?
53. What is tension? What is its cause?
54. What is required to accelerate an object?
55. What is the relationship among net force, mass, and acceleration?
56. What is the mass of 2 kilograms of yogurt? What is the weight?
57. How much force is required to accelerate a 20 000kg rocket at 4 m/s/s?
58. Why doesn’t a sky diver continue to accelerate all the way to the ground?
59. A normal tennis ball and a sand-filled tennis ball all are dropped from a tall building. Which will hit the ground first ideally? Really?
60. If for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, shouldn’t when a horse tries to pull a wagon, the wagon will pull back on the horse canceling out the horse’s force? Should there be no movement? Explain how this logic is flawed.
61. What is the difference between an inertial and non-inertial reference frame?
62. How is your weight affected by an elevator?
63. How does an incline plane complicate problems?
Unit 4: Circular Motion
64. What is uniform circular motion? Give some real-life examples.
65. Is uniform circular motion an example of accelerated motion? If not, why not. If so, what causes this acceleration?
66. Why is it called “centripetal” acceleration?
67. Compare and contrast the motions of three spots along the radius of a record moving with UCM.
68. How is tangential velocity calculated? How is angular velocity calculated?
69. Contrast centripetal and centrifugal forces.
70. If a 500 kg car tries to round an unbanked curve of radius of 100. meters at 20 m/s, will it skid out or round the curve safely?
71. What banking angle would be necessary for the above problem? (maybe the answer is 0°).
72. What is the maximum and minimum apparent weights of a 65 kg person on a Ferris wheel (radius 25 m) which makes one full rotation every 40 seconds?
73. What is the law of universal gravitation?
74. A satellite orbits Earth 225 km above its surface. What is its speed in orbit and its period?
75. What is a gravitational field? Where could you find one?
Unit 5: Momentum
76. What is linear momentum?
77. Compare and contrast mass and momentum.
78. What is an impulse?
79. What does the area of a force vs. time graph represent?
80. When increasing momentum, there are two variables to think about. What are they? How do you maximize each?
81. Two situations: 1:A car at 50 mph hits a tree and stops, 2: A car at 50 mph hits a pile of hay and stops. Do they both have the same impulse and impact? Explain.
82. What does it mean to say momentum is conserved?
83. As you walk along a sidewalk, a flower pot (terra cotta) hits your head and shatters instantly. Somewhere in the world, your twin has the identical experience, except with a plastic flower pot which bounces. Who has the potential to be hurt more? Explain.
84. What is the momentum of a 50. kg carton that slides at 4.0 m/s across an icy surface? The sliding surface skids onto a rough surface and stops after 3.0 seconds. Calculate the force of friction it encounters.
85. What is meant by “Momentum is Conserved?”
86. How does a 0% elastic collision differ from a 50% elastic collision differ from a 100% elastic collision? Explain with a numeric example. Give real life examples of each.
87. A 2-kg blob of putty moving at 3 m/s slams into a 4-kg blob of putty at rest. Calculate the speed of the two stuck together blobs of putty immediately after colliding.
88. A loaded spear gun, initially at rest, goes off and sends a 0.5 kg spear flying forward at 25 m/s. Assuming a frictionless surface, how fast does the 2.0 kg spear gun slide backwards? If the surface is not frictionless, how long (time) would it take a 30. N friction force to stop the gun?
89. If a firecracker was falling with a momentum of 10 units downward, when the firecracker exploded, what would the sum total of all the momentums of all the little pieces?
Unit 6: Work and Energy
90. What is energy? What is work?
91. Calculate the work done in lifting a 20. kg barbell a distance of 3.0 m.
92. When do you have positive work? Negative work? How do these relate to the following example?
93. If it takes 70 calories of work output to pedal a bicycle for an hour, how many hours would you have to pedal to lose one pound of fat?
94. What is special about the force a spring exerts?
95. What does a graph of force vs stretch for a spring look like? What law does this illustrate?
96. What is represented by the area under the above graph?
97. What is mechanical energy? What does it allow a body to do?
98. What is kinetic energy? How is it calculated?
99. What is potential energy? What are the mechanical forms of it? How are they calculated?
100. How are non-mechanical forms of energy used for work?
101. What do conservative forces do to the total mechanical energy of a system?
102. What is meant by the statement: “Energy is Conserved.”?
103. What is the Work-Energy Theorem?
104. A boulder is raised above the ground so that its gravitational potential energy is 200 Joules, what is its kinetic energy just before the boulder hits the ground? If the boulder is 10 kg, how high is it raised? How fast will it be going just before it hits the ground?
105. What is a machine? Does it multiply energy?
106. What is the difference between the input and the output sides of a machine?
107. What is mechanical advantage?
108. A type 1 lever is used to lift a barrel. If a 50. N force pushes one end of the lever down 1.2 m, the load rises 0.2 m. Calculate the weight of the load.
109. In raising a 5000 N piano with a pulley system, the workers note that for every 2.0 meters of rope pulled down, the piano rises 0.4 m. Ideally, how much force is required to lift the load?
110. In the above problem, if the workers actually pull with a force of 2500 N to lift the piano, what is this efficiency of the pulley system?
111. Under certain conditions a car can stop from 10mph in 30feet. How far would it take to stop under the same conditions if the car were initially moving at 20 mph? 30 mph?
112. What is power?
113. Calculate the power done in lifting a 30. kg basket of mangos a distance of 2.5 m in 2.0 seconds.
Unit 7: Light
114. Describe images formed by plane mirrors.
115. Why is it hard to see when driving on a rainy night?
116. If light enters a piece of sapphire (n= 1.77) from air with an angle of incidence of 35°, at what angle will it refract?
117. When light comes from the sun, it is unpolarized. What does this mean?
118. When light reflects off of a surface, what happens to it?
119. From where do electromagnetic waves come?
120. If you shoot a bullet into a tree, it will slow down in the tree, and come out the other side with a speed less than it went in. Is light like this? Explain why or why not.
121. What is Total Internal Reflection? Under what conditions will it occur? What are some real world examples of it?
122. What are lenses?
123. How do you tell a converging lens from a diverging lens just by looking or feeling?
124. Draw what a converging lens does to incoming parallel light rays. How would this drawing look for a diverging lens?
125. What can be said about images formed by converging lenses?
126. What can be said about images formed by diverging lenses?
127. What types of images are formed by converging mirrors?
128. What types of images are formed by diverging mirrors?
129. What is the difference (in second grade terms) between transparent, translucent, and opaque materials?
130. What is the difference (microscopically, to sophisticated physics types) between transparent, translucent, and opaque materials?
131. Why are some materials shiny? (looking for a microscopically-based answer)
132. Why do wet materials look wet, even though water is transparent?
133. What is the electromagnetic spectrum?