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O-Level Kinematics
What the O-Level syllabus expects for Kinematics, and how to practise it.
What the syllabus expects
- Explain what speed and velocity mean.
- Work out average speed using average speed = distance travelled / time taken.
- Explain what uniform acceleration means and compute acceleration from change in velocity / time taken.
- Make sense of supplied instances of non-uniform acceleration.
- Draw and read displacement-time and velocity-time graphs for one-dimensional motion.
- From a displacement-time graph's shape, work out when a body is at rest, moving at uniform velocity, or moving at non-uniform velocity.
- From a velocity-time graph's shape, work out when a body is at rest, moving at uniform velocity, moving with uniform acceleration, or moving with non-uniform acceleration.
- Find displacement from the area beneath a velocity-time graph for motion at uniform velocity or uniform acceleration.
- State that free-fall acceleration close to the Earth stays constant at roughly 10 m/s2.
How it's examined
About 8% of the past-paper style questions in Rae's bank for this subject sit in this topic.
Worked examples
Example 1 (2 marks)
The near-Earth asteroid 2023 DZ2 was reported to travel at roughly "25,200 kmh" (properly written, 25,200 km/h). Using the properly written form of this speed, work out the asteroid's speed in metres per second (m/s) and give your result in standard form.
Show the worked answer
Convert 25 200 km/h to m/s: multiply by 1000 (m per km) and divide by 3600 (s per hour). speed = 25200 x 1000 / 3600 = 7000 m/s = 7.00 x 10³ m/s.
More O-Level Pure Physics topics
Physical Quantities, Units and Measurement · Dynamics · Turning Effects of Forces · Pressure · Energy · Kinetic Particle Model of Matter · all of O-Level Pure Physics