Edexcel GCSE Combined Science Paper 5: Physics 1 Higher November 2020 question paper 1SC0/1PH

A student lifts a toy car from a bench and places the toy car at the top of a slope as shown in Figure 1.

Describe an energy transfer that occurs when the student lifts the toy car from the bench and places the toy car at the top of the slope.

The student lets the toy car roll down the slope.

Describe how the student could find, by experiment, the speed of the toy car at the bottom of the slope.

The student needs to develop the experiment to determine the loss in potential energy and the gain in kinetic energy as the toy car is rolling down the slope.

State the other measurements the student must make.

When the toy car rolls down the slope, some energy is transferred to the surroundings as thermal energy.

State how the student could calculate the amount of energy transferred to the surroundings.

Which of these is a vector?

State the equation that relates acceleration to change in velocity and time taken.

A van accelerates from a velocity of 2 m / s to a velocity of 20 m / s in 12 s.

Calculate the acceleration of the van.

acceleration =_........ m / s²

Figure 2 is a velocity / time graph for 15 s of a cyclist’s journey.

Calculate the distance the cyclist travels in the 15 s.

distance =_........ m

Another cyclist starts from rest, but his acceleration decreases as time increases.

Sketch the velocity / time graph for this cyclist on Figure 2.

A radio station transmits on 97.4 MHz.

To receive the waves an aerial needs a length equal to half the wavelength of the radio waves being transmitted.

Calculate the length of the aerial needed.

The speed of the radio waves is 3.00 × 10⁸m / s.

length of aerial =_........ m

To investigate refraction in a rectangular glass block a student uses the apparatus shown in Figure 3.

Describe how the student should measure the angle of refraction.

Figure 4 is a simplified diagram to show radio waves from a transmitter moving upwards, then meeting a boundary between lower and upper layers of the atmosphere.

Explain what happens to the radio waves after they meet the boundary between the lower and upper layers as shown in Figure 4.

Your explanation should refer to changes in direction and speed of the waves.

Calculate the difference between the students’ value and the accepted value as a percentage of the accepted value.

percentage difference =_........ %

When the distance was 100 m, the students measured the following times:

0.43 s 0.35 s 0.50 s 0.38 s

Explain why their times vary so much.

Explain one way the students might improve this experiment.

Draw and label a distance of one wavelength in Figure 6.

Describe the motion of the particles as the wave travels through the air.

Which of these describes isotopes of an element?

Figure 7 represents a decay that can happen inside the nucleus of an atom.

Which decay is represented in Figure 7?

The half-life of cobalt-60 is 5 years.

A school cobalt source had an activity of 38.5 kBq in the year 2000.

Estimate the activity of this source in the year 2020.

activity =_........ kBq

Explain what can happen to the body if a person has a prolonged exposure to gamma rays.

Calculate the average count rate, in counts / s, from the graph.

Show your working on the graph.

average count rate =_........ counts / s

The student says that the experiment must have been done carelessly because the data seemed quite scattered away from the best fit line.

The teacher claims such results should be expected in radioactivity experiments.

Justify the teacher’s claim.

Figure 9 is a diagram showing a rocket that is sent into space to try and change the path of a small asteroid.

The rocket has a mass of 5.510⁵kg and is travelling to the right at 14 km / s.

Which of these is a correct calculation of the momentum of the rocket in kg m / s?

Use the equation

The asteroid has a momentum of 7.510¹⁰kg m / s and a mass of 8.0 × 10⁶kg.

Calculate the speed of the asteroid.

speed of the asteroid =_........ m / s

Newton’s third law, when applied to the collision of the rocket and the asteroid as shown in Figure 9, can be stated as follows:

The force exerted by the rocket on the asteroid is equal and opposite to the force exerted by the asteroid on the rocket.

Explain how this statement links to the conservation of momentum in the collision.