Physics Problems Page

THE PHYSICS TUTOR

Helping Students Online since 1998

Topic Explanations - Over 70 Audio-Visual Tutorials - Over 450 Worked Problems - Teaching/Interactive Problems

In addition to their own research, the authors of this site have taught tens of thousands of physics and calculus students and sold hundreds of thousands of physics books. See authors for more background.

We provide brief discussions (reviews) of physics topics, corresponding to chapters in a typical physics text, followed by audio-visual tutorials, worked problems and our unique version of teaching problems that guarantees you know how to work problems. Check out these four samples of the kind of help you will get from this site.

1) Sample short discussion of each topic: Projectiles

2) Sample audio-visual slide show tutorial: Projectile Tutorial

3) Sample worked problem: Baseball hit over fence?

4) Sample teaching problem (show/hide) approach): Marble falling down stairs

LINKS

Ų	LEARN PHYSICS PROBLEM SOLVING SKILLS
Ų	READ THE BRIEF REVIEWS OF EACH TOPIC
Ų	WATCH THE TUTORIALS (70 of them) Multiple times if necessary
Ų	REVIEW PROBLEMS - PROBLEM - PROBLEMS (450 of them)
Ų	HAVE THE CONFIDENCE TO BREEZE THROUGH TESTS
Ų	WORK LESS AND STILL GET HIGHER GRADES

We show you how to work physics problems efficiently and quickly because we get to the heart of learning physics - Doing The Problems. First read a short discussion of each of the main topics in physics, corresponding to chapters in a typical physics text, then watch the audio-visual tutorials. With this background continue to the worked problems and our unique version of teaching problems that guarantees you learn how to do the problems.

Membership to the site may make the difference between excellence and mediocrity, or perhaps between survival and failure.

Struggling with physics? Of course you are. That is why you came to this site. No one says physics is easy, especially not us, because we struggled too. Generations of physics students, including us, have said: "I understood everything in lecture and the text, but I still can't do the problems." By joining this site you will learn how we learned to do physics problems quickly and efficiently. And what are these physics problems? The ones you are most likely to encounter on your tests. No matter whether you are in a calculus based physics course or a non-calculus based one the problems on this site will prepare you for your next test.

If you want to get better grades on your tests, and spend less time getting those higher grades, join today?

This web site is where you will learn problem solving skills!

Ever wish you had a physics tutor that was there for you all the time, day or night whenever you wanted, never required an appointment and was willing to go over and over a procedure until you got it right? And in addition cost less than the price of a single tutoring session, or problems book! This site is that tutor. And you can access the site even the last few minutes before the text.

Who are the people that are going to help you? We are experienced physics profs with academic and industrial experience. We did not start off knowing how to do physics problems, we started off confused. But we figured out how to understand physics and apply that understanding to doing problems.

As physicists we get paid to solve problems. Any profession requires problem solving and physics problems are the hardest of all. If you can solve physics problems you can generally solve any other problems. Much of our professional lives have been devoted to helping our students develop the skills to solve problems. All the skills (tricks if you like) we have learned to solve physics problems are explained on the site.

We have seen the studies, but you know from observation and perhaps experience that physics courses can ruin a career, or at least make it more difficult. For the small cost of membership you can help your career, possibly survive when you may not have survived or excel when where you were headed for mediocrity. At the least you will have a better physics grade and if you want to work in the sciences or engineering or continue to graduate school those good physics grades are going to be a big factor in getting a good job or getting into the graduate school of your choice.

The web site you can sample here has all these features and more. If you buy a problems book you can read how others do problems. If you go to a problems oriented class you will see how the instructor does the problems. If you hire a tutor you will see how the tutor does the problems. All these experiences are great, but what you really want is the skill to do the problems yourself.

On this web site each topic is introduced with a short discussion covering the essential information and necessary formulas. You also have worked problems, over 450 of them, with accompanying discussion of procedures and hints for pitfalls to avoid. In addition, and this is what the books, the classes and the tutors do not have, we have teaching problems where you can drill yourself on correct procedures and keep going back over the procedures until you know you have them right. And further, we have audio-visual slideshow tutorials of classic problems. These tutorials are just like going to a lecture on how to solve problems. Actually they are better, because you can play them over and over until you have the procedures down.

Check out the many samples below (Prj11 and TPrj13 are excellent examples) and ask yourself if this will help you get a better grade, and get that better grade easier than your present study method. The problems are organized into areas such as Mechanics, Magnetism, Light, etc. with specific categories paralleling the chapter outline of a typical college or university level physics book. After reviewing the concepts and watching the tutorials proceed on to the problems.

About half the problems use a show/hide approach. In these problems you first see the statement of the problem and possibly a prompt to draw a diagram. Clicking the show/hide button shows this next step in the problem. With successive show/hide buttons the route through the problem is slowly revealed. This way you can follow along the problem and work it out while checking each step along the way. We think this is much better way of teaching how to do problems than stating the problem and then prompting you for the answer.

After you get used to this technique of learning how to apply concepts to problem solving you will look over the worked problems and then copy the "T" or teaching problems with the hide buttons, and work through the problem yourself successively checking yourself by "showing" each step in the problem. A little unsure of the procedure? No Problem. Just come back another time and do it again. Still a little unsure? Review one of the audio-visual slideshow presentations You will effectively teach yourself to do the problems in a non-threatening (no class, no tutor, no colleagues that are moving at a pace different from yours) environment. Take as long as it takes. When you can do the problem completely without opening any show buttons, you have mastered the technique for that type of problem. And what are these problems? They are the ones we and our colleagues are using on tests.

Selected problems in the first five topics. Vectors, Motion, Falling Bodies Projectiles and Force (without friction), are free! Membership in the site allows access to all the problem areas for one full year. Click on the Subscribe Now link below and pay with any major credit card. After that you can sign in each time you visit the site and have access to all the problems plus all the tutorials.

Remember: Doing problems is how you get graded!

Don't wait another day. Stop grinding on physics problems and get the help you need to get better grades, spend less time on physics and have confidence that you can do the problems.

Join the site that shows you how to do problems!

Membership to the site may make the difference between excellence and mediocrity, or perhaps between survival and failure.

The topic areas are listed below. These first five topics in Mechanics (yellow background below) contain lists of all the problems and some free problems so you can really sample what you will get by joining the site Click on the links to go to the various topic areas where you will find the free problems.

Mechanics
Vectors	Motion	Falling Body Problems	Projectiles	Force (without friction)

Force (with friction)	Apparent Weight	Work	Power
Work-Energy	Momentum	Rotational Motion	Rotational Dynamics
Equilibrium	Simple Harmonic Motion	Fluids	Solids

Waves and Sound

Mechanical Waves

Sound

Heat
Temperature and Calorimetry	Heat Transfer
First Law of Thermodynamics	The Gas Law
Second Law of Thermodynamics

Electricity and Magnetism
Coulomb's Law	Electric Fields	Gauss' Law	Electric Potential
Capacitance	Electric Current	Electric Circuits I	Electric Circuits II
Magnetic Fields I	Magnetic Fields II	Induction/Faraday's Laws	RLC Circuits

Light
Maxwell's Equations	Reflection, Refraction and Polarization	Interference and Diffraction	Mirrors and Lenses

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