Our Physics Quiz Page

Questions I

1. Does light travel fastest in air, water or a vacuum?
2. Whose law is a formula used to describe the relationship between the angles of refraction and incidence when light passes through the boundary of two different mediums?
3. Which branch of physics is concerned with heat and temperature and their relation to energy and work?
4. Which scientist gave his name to the elastic modulus that is a measure of the stiffness of a solid material?
5. You are in a boat on a lake with a large heavy rock also in the boat. You throw the rock overboard and it sinks to the bottom of the lake. Does the water level in the lake rise, fall or stay the same?





6. What elastic tendency of a fluid surface allows insects denser than water to walk on a water's surface?
7. What is the 'mass per unit volume' better known as?
8. In electrical engineering, what name is given to the power-producing component of an electric machine?
9. Which is the weakest of the four known fundamental forces?
10. What is the derived unit of electric conductance?
11. Do you weigh less, the same, or more at the equator?
12. Knighted in 1866 by Queen Victoria, by what name do we better know physicist Sir William Thomson?
13. Which constant is the number of constituent particles, usually molecules or atoms, that are contained in the amount of substance given by one mole?
14. 'The Dark Side of the Moon' album cover by Pink Floyd features which object refracting light?
15. Triton, the only large moon in the Solar System with an orbit in the opposite direction to its planet's rotation, is a satellite of which planet?
16. Whose law states that the current through a conductor between two points is directly proportional to the voltage across the points?

Answers:

1. Vacuum
2. Snell's Law
3. Thermodynamics
4. (Thomas) Young (as in Young's modulus)
5. The water level falls (work out using Archimedes' principle)
6. Surface tension
7. Density
8. Armature
9. Gravity
10. Siemens
11. Less (gravity is less at the equator due to the centrifugal force of the spinning earth)
12. Lord Kelvin
13. Avogadro constant
14. A prism
15. Neptune
16. Ohms law

Physics Questions II

1. What name is given to atoms of an element with the normal number of protons and electrons, but different numbers of neutrons?
2. What name is given to a special type of material that conducts electricity without resistance?
3. In physics, what name is given to the maximum disturbance of a wave from its undisturbed position?
4. Which German theoretical physicist is the originator of the theory of quantum mechanics?
5. Which physical constant relates to the average kinetic energy of particles in a gas with the temperature of the gas?
6. In electrical machines what is defined as exactly 746 watts?
7. In which English county was Sir Isaac Newton born?
8. In physics, what is the SI unit of magnetic flux?
9. What name is given to the change in direction of propagation of a wave due to a change in its transmission medium?
10. Name the historical screwpump used for transferring water from a low-lying body of water into irrigation ditches?
11. In a physics lab, what is a CRO?
12. What is the number of occurrences of a repeating event per unit time?
13. Whose first law states that 'the algebraic sum of currents in a network of conductors meeting at a point is zero'?
14. How many Kepler's laws of planetary motion are there?
15. What is the unit of capacitance?

Answers:

1. Isotopes
2. A superconductor
3. The amplitude
4. Max Planck
5. Boltzmann constant
6. The Horsepower
7. Lincolnshire
8. Weber
9. Refraction
10. Archimedes screw
11. Cathode-ray oscilloscope
12. Frequency
13. Kirchhoff
14. Three
15. Farad

Physics Questions III

1. Which sort of force makes a body follow a curved path?
2. In electronics, what does the acronym LED mean?
3. Who invented the mercury thermometer?
4. In Newtonian physics, what name is given to describe any motion of a body where gravity is the only force acting upon it?
5. Metals are good conductors of electricity because they contain free what?
6. What effect is the change in frequency of a wave for an observer moving relative to its source?
7. What has a value of 9.81 metres per second squared?
8. Who first published his law in 1660 as a Latin anagram, and then stated the solution in 1678 as ut tensio, sic vis?
9. In an electrical circuit what is given by the product of the current and the voltage?
10. Who discovered radioactivity in 1896?
11. What does the acronym 'laser' stand for?
12. The International Space Station is in a LEO; what is LEO?
13. Which energy is possessed by a body by virtue of its position?
14. What name is given to a cylindrical coil of wire that when a current flows through it becomes electromagnetic?
15. Up, down, strange, charm, top, and bottom and known as flavours of which subatomic particle?

Answers:

1. Centripetal force
2. Light emitting diode
3. Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit
4. Free fall
5. Electrons
6. Doppler effect
7. Gravity
8. Robert Hook
9. Power
10. Henri Becquerel
11. Light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation
12. Low Earth Orbit
13. Potential energy
14. A solenoid
15. Quarks