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QUESTIONS FOR ORAL EXAMINATION 1.

In usually warm climates that experience occasional hard freeze, fruit growers will spray the fruit trees with water, hoping that a layer of ice will form on the fruit. Why would such layer be advantageous? (Hint: Latent heat of fusion)

2. A tile floor may be uncomfortably cold to your bare feet, but a carpeted floor at the same temperature feels warm. Why? 3. You wanted to verify if a suspected piece of gold nugget is real gold. Can a calorimetric experiment be devised to test for the authenticity of the metal? If so, describe the procedure in detail. 4. Concrete has higher specific heat capacity than soil. Use this fact to explain why a city has a higher average temperature than the surrounding countryside. Would you expect evening breeze to blow from a city to country or from country to city? Explain. 5. Heat is work and work is heat. That is a restatement of the First Law of Thermodynamics. How is this so? Give a situation where this can be observed. 6. Using the first law of thermodynamics, explain why the total energy in a system is always constant. 7. Why cant heat engines be 100% efficient? 8. Is it possible to create a steam engine that creates no thermal pollution? 9. A steam-driven turbine is one major component of an electric power plant. Why is it advantageous to increase the temperature of the steam as much as possible? 10. What is wrong in this statement: Given any two bodies, the one with the higher temperature contains more heat. 11. Distinguish between a mechanical wave and an electromagnetic wave. 12. Describe the following types of wave motion: longitudinal, transverse, and surface waves.

13. Explain the relationship between wave speed, wavelength, and frequency. 14. Sound could cause an avalanche. How could this be possible? 15. Explain how sound is produced and how it travels from the source to an observer. 16. How does the motion of the source of wave and/or of the observer affect the characteristics of the waves? How would a stationary police, for example, with its siren on, sound differently from one that is moving towards you and one that is moving away from you? 17. Sound waves and light waves are different from each other. In what ways do they differ from each other? Describe the changes that these waves undergo when they travel from one medium to another, say, from air to water? 18. Reflection takes place when waves hit a boundary that doesnt allow them to pass through. Reflection occurs both when waves hit a wall and a mirror, but why do we see an image in the mirror but not in the wall? 19. What is responsible for why a pencil dipped in a glass of water appear broken? Explain in detail how this happens. 20. Explain the principle of superposition. How does it make interference possible? 21. A particular material has a natural frequency range of 50Hz-500Hz. What will happen when a mechanical wave whose frequency is 100Hz? 22. An opera singer was rumored to be capable of breaking a wine glass by singing a note. Is this physically possible? What conditions must be satisfied in order to shatter the glass using sound waves. 23. Two waves can be less destructive than one. How could this be possible?

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