Monday's Quiz, Kinetic Theory Simulation Program

Monday's quiz will mostly deal with ideal gas law related material, but will include some very basic questions from our discussion of the kinetic theory of gases.

The Kinetic Theory of Gases Simulation may be found here.

Quiz Key, Exam 1, Exam Q&A Session

The quiz 3 key can be found here. I will not have time to finish grading quiz 3 before tonight's class.

Exam 1 will be on Tuesday, 9/21. The exam will cover chapters 1-4, and all lectures up through this Thursday. Note that the exam will be graded immediately after you take it, and grades will be sent out via email, the following day. This is to provide you with as much information as possible in case you want to drop the class without receiving a W on your transcript.

There will be a Q&A review session for the exam this Thursday, 9/16. The review session will be generated by your questions! I will not lead a structured or comprehensive review. You will also have a chance to ask questions before the exam during next week's office hour.

Presentation Ideas, Quiz Key, Lecture Notes

For presentation ideas, you might want to try the following publications:

MIT Technology Review

Scientific American

Popular Science

New Scientist

Please signup for a presentation time now! The first day is only three weeks from now!

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Quiz 2 Key:

Can be found here. Please take a look! Performance on the quiz was generally pretty poor.

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Lecture Notes

Can be found here

Significant Figures

A student in the class has asked:

In working some practice problems, I became a little confused with the number of significant figures for numbers without decimals. The solutions in the book indicate the following for example: 358 (3 significant figures) ...should this be infinite significant figures? I thought that it would be three sig. figs. if this had a decimal place.

Answer:

This are only 3 sig figs in 358, and a decimal place would only be required to indicate as much if the number ended in a zero (like 350.) or multiple zeros (like 300.). absolute numbers, with infinite significance are rare. They include metric system conversion factors (as long as the conversion is simply one of magnitude, i.e. 1m = 1000 mm), stoichiometric numbers (we will see examples of this in chapter 3), formula numbers (the number 2 and 6 in the molecular formula C2H6), and perhaps others in other field of physical science.

If you can think of any others, please suggest them.

Handouts

Here.

In particular pay attention to the "Text Practice Question Breakdown." This pdf will show you how questions are broken down by similarity in your textbook. When doing practice problems, you should do as many different kinds of problems as possible. Hopefully this pdf will make it easier for you to do that.

The Lab report instructions and example will guide you through lab reports.

The common ions handout is a self -explanatory study tool. Also, the periodic tables with charges will be similarly informative.

Lab Schedule

here.

Lab

Tuesday: Check-in and Safety lecture

Thursday: Experiment 2 (lab manual can be found here. Note that if you'd rather print out the lab manual or view it on an e-reader, the pdf's can be found at this link)

Full semester schedule will be sent out shortly.