Physics Year 2 Pre-Course Questions

University of Bristol
2015

These questions are intended to

start to prepare you mentally for study after the summer break
revise some important topics from the first year
reinforce some generic skills you should have learnt
teach you to solve physics problems rather than following step-by-step instructions.
The physics principles should all be familiar, but you will probably find answering
the problems quite challenging. You should clearly state any assumptions used or
approximations made.
1. You clap your hands once standing in front of a flight of stairs, each step
with the same tread depth of 30 cm. You hear a response that is essentially
a short tone, which has a frequency of 550 Hz. Determine the speed of sound
in air.
2. A 100 m long non-conducting plastic rod is bent into a nearly complete circle,
with a gap of 1 mm between the two ends. A charge of 108 C is spread
uniformly over the rod. Calculate the magnitude and direction of the electric
field at the centre of the circle.
3. The value of g measured at the bottom of a mineshaft is higher than that
measured at the surface. Show that this implies the density of the Earths
crust is less than 2/3 that of the mean density of the Earth.

4. A wire stretches from one side of an Earth-orbiting space station to the other
through the centre of mass of the station, such that it always points along a
radial line to the centre of the Earth. A bead is threaded on the wire and
initially rests 1 m from the centre of mass position, on the side away from
the Earth. Ignoring friction between the wire and bead, determine the time
it takes for the bead to move 2.6 m further away from the Earth, given the
space station orbits at an altitude of 216 km.
5. It takes 25 minutes for a train to pass through a tunnel and one train enters
the tunnel every five minutes. An engine generating 3 MW of power pulls
each train. The tunnel is water-cooled with water that exits the tunnel at
30 C, which is then cooled to 5 C via a refrigeration plant and circulated
back into the tunnel. Determine the water flow rate (mass per unit time)
through the system.
Show that the energy that needs to be supplied to an ideal refrigerator to
cool a mass M of with specific heat C by T from an initial temperature Ti
is
T 2
1
E MC
2
Ti
and hence estimate the power required to operate the refrigerator that cools
the tunnel water.
6. A Chlorine molecule has a binding energy of 2.5 eV. One molecule is observed
to have a speed of 500 m/s in the lab frame. The same molecule is dissociated
into its constituent atoms, with one atom moving at 1000 m/s perpendicular
to the original direction of the molecule. Determine the wavelength of the
photon that dissociated the molecule.
7. A conducting sphere of mass m, radius a (and therefore capacitance 4a) is
suspended by a conducting wire of length l. The top of the wire is connected
to earth. Two large vertical parallel metal plates are placed on either side
of the sphere an equal distance b  a from the sphere when it is at rest.
The plates are then given potentials of +V1 and V1 respectively, Show that
there is a minimum value of V1 which causes the sphere to be attracted to
one of the plates if it is slightly perturbed from its original position.
8. The air within a 500 m3 space station is an 80/20 mix of nitrogen and oxygen.
It is kept at a temperature of 27 C and at normal atmospheric pressure until
the station is holed by a micro-meteorite. This causes the pressure to drop
by 10 per cent in 10 minutes. Estimate the area of the hole.