Hints on practice problems

I'm not sure why hints aren't working on the practice problems. Baffling.

If you're having trouble with any of them, I did work them all out this afternoon. Send me a message of some sort, and I will give you some hints of my own. Same goes for HW7 I suppose, if you're still having trouble.

Exam 3 practice problems / details

There are some exam 3 practice problems on Mastering Physics now. I have set it up so you can guess without penalty an unlimited number of times, and 'give up' to view the answer at any point. These are just for exam practice, they will not count toward your grade at all.

Additionally, exam 3 will have 5 problems, of which I will grade the best 4. You can bring in a formula sheet as before, and I will provide a basic formula sheet (which I will post Monday night so you can see it ahead of time, but it may be late before I get it done ...).

Practice problem bugfixes

There were an embarrassing number of typos in the solutions, so here are some fixes. I'm not saying I caught all of them, but a lot of the silly errors are gone at least.

It is embarrassing when I make little mistakes, since I'm supposed to know better. When you do it on the exam, it is just a point or two off since you're still learning :-)

I guess the lesson is that one should never stop practicing ... you never know it well enough that mistakes are not possible.

UPDATE: moments later, someone pointed out that on problem 4, 11 rad = 1.75 revolutions (not 5.1 rev). The linked file is fixed now.

Exam 2 practice problems

Some practice problems. The first few are missing solutions, I will add those later tonight. I may also add a few more problems tonight.

UPDATE: added a couple new problems, and there are now solutions to all problems. Same link above.

Conceptual mechanics test

We haven't covered all the right material yet (e.g., torque, tomorrow), and some of it is actually in PH102, but here is a nice mechanical aptitude test. Some similarities to the one you took at the start of the term.

Exam 2 is soon ...

For the next test, I'm planning to include most of the material after that covered by exam 1 up until Monday of next week. Specifically,

Ch. 6.1,2
Ch. 7.2-7
Ch. 8.1-5
Ch. 9 all
Ch. 10.1-6

The second exam will be much like the first in format. I'll try to have some practice problems out before the weekend, but doing the worked examples in the book is a very good place to start, as are the homework problems.

More practice problems

Here are a few practice problems from another course, with solutions.

Circular motion

Among other things, we'll be covering circular motion tomorrow. Here's a nice applet demonstrating the relationship between velocity and acceleration in circular motion.

In fact, there are many nice simulations on PhET site, for instance, this one on circular motion. If you're having trouble with concepts, playing with some of these applets might be a good thing to try.

Exam 1 practice problem

A few practice problems. Short solutions are included at the end. A couple of them are much harder than anything I'd ask on the actual exam, but still very useful for studying ...