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Physics HL Paper 3


madame_lexie

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Finally the 24hrs are up; I've been dying to ask you guys your opinion on paper 3. I was counting on it to be easy, to make up for my massacre in paper 2, but I was let down. Am I the only one who found Astrophysics super-duper hard? It was nothing like the past papers! I also did medical physics, which was okay apart from the x-ray question, got really confused.

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It was pretty easy to be honest except that i didn't revise for the microwave background radiation lol and i think i screwed that part as there were 2-3 questions based around it.

My options were Astrophysics and Medical Physics. Medical was ok...but Astro was definitely easier.

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I had Communications and Wave phenomena. Neither seemed too hard, for one I can say that they were a lot easier than the in the N12 paper we had in the mock. Even the op-amp stuff was easy this time, as was the HL extension of the wave option.

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Finally the 24hrs are up; I've been dying to ask you guys your opinion on paper 3. I was counting on it to be easy, to make up for my massacre in paper 2, but I was let down. Am I the only one who found Astrophysics super-duper hard? It was nothing like the past papers! I also did medical physics, which was okay apart from the x-ray question, got really confused.

Actually the Astro part was not very hard. Just some things to remember that's all I think)

I had Communications and Wave phenomena. Neither seemed too hard, for one I can say that they were a lot easier than the in the N12 paper we had in the mock. Even the op-amp stuff was easy this time, as was the HL extension of the wave option.

Yea N12 seemed much more difficult.

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Astro was fine. I was just surprised they expected us to remember the temperature of spectral class M - luckily I read it the night before.

Did anyone do relativity? I'm pretty sure the simultaneity question only worked if the train is inside the tunnel not approaching... Anyone get this problem?

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Astro was fine. I was just surprised they expected us to remember the temperature of spectral class M - luckily I read it the night before.

Did anyone do relativity? I'm pretty sure the simultaneity question only worked if the train is inside the tunnel not approaching... Anyone get this problem?

Yeh, I just read the spectral classes before the exam haha, 3000K?

For the simultaneity question I think I just assumed that the train was passing the observer at the exact moment the two lamps were turned on; I didn't really think about it too much, might have got it wrong.

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Med Physics was ayt for me except I stopped working after I saw the paper that told me to stop writing... Then I saw there was one more page of questions after that with like 6 minutes left so yeah.. HAHAHA

Luckily, EM Waves was a breeze

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EM waves was a total breeze. But I expected Medical physics to be a lot easier, so I don't think I concentrated on revising that as much as i should have and sorta messed up. A problem I did have was time, though. Spent too long working out some of the questions from the previous question and couldn't finish.

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Did Astro and Relativity, Astro wasn't as easy as expected but it was okay I guess, still lost marks in some places.

Relativity was.... :( I didn't know how to do most of the last part and I'm generally not confident in special relativity calculations lol. For simultaneity I got confused too, but I just assumed it was broken in that case. The only good question in that part was the muon one >_>

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Astro/Communications here!

Why did they have to put in a question about memorizing spectral classes =( I knew M-stars were the coldest, but my guesstimate of their temperature (I guessed 500 Kelvin there - temperature of a flame! lol) was pure rubbish! Hope that they give out follow-through marks for that question!

Communications people: Do you guys agree that for the bit-rate question (I think they called it the "total usable" frequency of the system or something similar), we had to mention Nyquist frequency, halfing the 44kHz? I wrote it down but I didn't expect that to come up in our options question, as it is part of the core topic Digital Technology... or did I perhaps misinterpret that question? The wording was kinda ambigious to me...

Other than that, the paper was not as bad as I have expected, could have been easier though! :)

Edited by Connex106
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I did EM Waves and Medical Physics - the only hard thing was noticing that there is a fourth sectipn (I4) in the exam (after a blank page) - my friend did not notice that LOL. My problem was I didnt really know how to formulate the answers (although I knew why the things are and why they are like that) for example in the question with one beam of X ray and few minor in dosimetry in Medical

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Astro was fine. I was just surprised they expected us to remember the temperature of spectral class M - luckily I read it the night before.

Did anyone do relativity? I'm pretty sure the simultaneity question only worked if the train is inside the tunnel not approaching... Anyone get this problem?

Yeah, me and my friend both had the exact same issue. Relativity is hard to get your head around, but with this they just seemed to re-reverse things. The proton acceleration was painful too - I ended up with a speed of 1.71c :ateeq:

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Astro was fine. I was just surprised they expected us to remember the temperature of spectral class M - luckily I read it the night before.

Did anyone do relativity? I'm pretty sure the simultaneity question only worked if the train is inside the tunnel not approaching... Anyone get this problem?

Yeah, me and my friend both had the exact same issue. Relativity is hard to get your head around, but with this they just seemed to re-reverse things. The proton acceleration was painful too - I ended up with a speed of 1.71c :ateeq:

O oh...

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  • 5 weeks later...

Astro was fine. I was just surprised they expected us to remember the temperature of spectral class M - luckily I read it the night before.

Did anyone do relativity? I'm pretty sure the simultaneity question only worked if the train is inside the tunnel not approaching... Anyone get this problem?

Yeah, me and my friend both had the exact same issue. Relativity is hard to get your head around, but with this they just seemed to re-reverse things. The proton acceleration was painful too - I ended up with a speed of 1.71c :ateeq:

O oh...

how are u gonna get something faster than the speed of light? hahahah anyways, im still douubting on doing Medical or Relativity....

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