Midterm Exam study guide
The midterm exam will take place on Friday, October 27.
Bring things to write with and a calculator. You may not use your phone or iPad as a calculator for the exam.
When I asked people in past classes to tell me how they prepared for exams, a common technique with those who did the best was studying with someone else.
Chemistry (Hobson Chapter 2) including
- Phases of matter (solid, liquid, gas).
- Atomic picture of temperature: That higher temperature means faster-moving molecules, and typically, things expand when heated.
- Atomic picture of pressure: related to how many molecules are hitting the walls of the container, and how hard they're hitting. (Faster, as in higher temperatures, means hitting harder).
- Brownian motion.
- Reading chemical formulas and chemical equations.
- Atomic and molecular weights.
- Using chemical formulas to figure out weight ratios of chemicals involved.
- Chemical energy resulting from rearrangements of bonds in chemical reactions.
Greenhouse effect
- What are the most common chemicals (gases) in Earth's atmosphere.
- Which of these are Greenhouse Gases (GHGs) and which are not.
- Electromagnetic radiation: resulting from shaking / acceleration of charged particles. Different wavelengths have different names, like visible, microwave, radio, infrared, x-ray radiation.
- Heat transmission can take place when two objects are in contact, or by radiation, even if they are not in contact with each other.
- The greenhouse effect: That the atmosphere is transparent to visible light but somewhat opaque to infrared radiation, and how this results in "trapping energy", and therefore heating up Earth's atmosphere.
- Why water vapor, which *is* a greenhouse gas, nevertheless is not under human control in the same way as carbon dioxide.
- Therefore reducing carbon dioxide emissions (and other non-water GHGs, like methane) is what can reduce greenhouse warming.
- Some history (ice ages, Arrhenius).
- How plants use carbon dioxide.
- The dangers of climate change: How *fast* it's happening compared to climate changes throughout Earth's history (including ice ages and very hot periods when carbon dioxide levels were much higher than today.)
Conversion factors and equations:
- I will supply you with conversion factors between any non-metric units needed. For example, cm to inches, pounds to kg, kilometers to miles.
- However, you should know (memorize) the conversion factors between metric units, which depend on the metric prefixes: Since kilo- means 1,000, you should know that 1 kilometer =1000 meters and 1 kilogram = 1000 grams. Other metric prefixes:
- milli-=1/1,000=$10^{-3}$
- micro- =1/1,000,000=$10^{-6}$
- centi- = 1/100
- nano- = $10^{-9}$
- kilo- = 1,000=$10^3$
- mega- = 1,000,000=$10^6$
- giga- = 1 billion = $10^9$.
- I will give you any formulas you need. These will include at least:
- acceleration = $a=\frac{\Delta v}{\Delta t}$. (You should know how to use the fact that this is also the slope of a line connecting two points on a speed vs time graph.)
- speed = $v=\frac{\Delta d}{\Delta t}$. (You should know how to use the fact that this is also the slope of a line connecting two points on a distance vs time graph.)
Labs
- Measuring distance from pictures/videos and knowing the length of some reference object in the picture.
- Graphing distance vs time and speed vs time.
- Visual ways to measure standard deviation (using the "70% rule") and averages of repeated measurements
- The result that all objects regardless of mass, if you could completely get rid of air resistance, would fall with the same acceleration, 9.8 m/s/s.
- The difference between speed (rate of change of distance) and acceleration (rate of change of speed).
Quiz
Wednesday in class you took that preparation quiz
