Mr. Harper
Physics
Midterm Study Guide
1. Which quantities that we have studied are vectors and which are scalars?
2. What are the standard SI units for each of these quantities?
3. What is the difference between distance and displacement, speed and velocity, velocity and
acceleration, weight and mass?
4. What is the slope of a position vs. time graph? A velocity vs. time graph?
5. What are the first things you need to describe motion?
6. What happens to the horizontal and vertical motions of a projectile as it travels through the air?
7. What are the rules of projectile motion?
8. How is motion relative?
9. How do you add vectors that are parallel? Perpendicular?
10. What are Newton’s three laws of motion?
11. What is inertia? Equilibrium? Action-reaction pairs?
12. How do you draw a free body diagram?
13. How do you determine the friction force acting on an object?
14. What is power? What factors does it depend on?
15. What is energy? What is work? How are they related?
16. When is energy conserved?
17. What are the different types of energy? What factors do they depend on?
18. How do machines make work easier? What is the tradeoff?
Midterm Review Problems
1. If you throw a ball straight up at 15 m/s, how high will it go?
2. A cannon is shot from ground level on flat ground at 34 m/s at an angle of 45°. How far away does the
cannon ball land when it hits the ground? What is the final velocity of the cannon when it lands?
3. If a car is moving east at 35 m/s while a truck is heading west at 50.0 m/s, what is the relative velocity
of the truck with respect to the car?
4. If I swim at 12.2 m/s West across a river that is flowing at 9.34 m/s South, what is my resulting
velocity?
5. A 750 N aluminum block is pushed from rest on a steel floor by a horizontal force of 875 N. What is the
block’s speed after 5.00 s? (µs = 0.61 and µk = 0.47)
6. Mr. Harper pushes on a 56 kg grocery cart horizontally from rest for 4.3 s to get down a 10.0 m aisle.
What force did he apply to the cart? (µs = 0.05 and µk = 0.025)
7. A 0.060 kg ball sits on a spring (k = 65 N/m) that is compressed 4.00 cm. If the spring is aligned
vertically, how high will the ball go?
8. A 75 kg bobsled is pushed along a horizontal surface by two athletes. After the bobsled is pushed a
distance of 4.5 m starting from rest, its speed is 6.0 m/s.
a. Find the magnitude of the net force on the bobsled.
b. Find the power required to push the bobsled.
Answers:
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11 m
120 m; 34 m/s at 45° below the horizontal
85 m/s west
15.4 m/s at 37.4° south of west
34 m/s
76 N
2.2 m
3.0 x 102 N; 9.0 x 102 W