Can anyone recommend a good text/reading material that explains this concept in a bit more detail than a standard high school physics/chemistry textbook would? Many thanks to all involved for your assistance.
And that precision is relative to? The precision of the original measurement which is to the hundredths place? Is that your meaning? That the precision of the result is of equal degree as the precision of the measurement?
Hello, all. Quick question about how to apply sig figs in percent error problems. Eg. If the actual/target value is 1.95 g and we measure 1.87 g, then should the percent error of our measurement be reported as 4.10% or 4%? Normally, at least abstracting from the problem, after subtracting...
Thank you very much. The precalculus book I'm using doesn't explain this question of the composition of domains very clearly. So, just to make sure I understand, the domain of f ° g in my example would be (0,1] and of g ° f would be [0, ∞). (I know that's how you prefaced your explanation...
Hi, I'm struggling to understand something. Does domain restriction work the same way for composition of inverse functions as it does for other composite functions? I would assume it does, but the end result seems counter-intuitive. For example:
If I have the function f(x) = 1/(1+x), with...
It's a half point for sig figs /units, or any other info that might be needed. So, it's a quarter of a point for each taken individually. Sorry if that was unclear.
My practice has been to deduct approximately 5% of the point value for the problem. So if the problem is 5 pts, I usually award 3 for correct set-up, and 1.5 for accurate calculations and half a point for significant digits/units/etc.
Sure, here it is:
A man is pushing a 150.0 kg desk across a floor. The frictional coefficients between the desk and the floor are μs = 0.45 and μk = 0.35. If the desk is already moving, how much force must the man exert to keep the desk accelerating at 0.30 m/sec2?
The textbook's rules for...
Yes, that's just it. Exactly the type of issue I'm dealing with, except in a multi-step physics problem, the intermediate answer can be off by quite a bit more than just a tenth. Today in class we looked at a Force vector problem or two involving friction, where, depending on where the...
Thank you to all for your insightful responses. I've read several of your recommendations in other places, but was not sure how prevalently held these opinions were. Saving the rounding for the end result makes good sense to me.
I'd like to thank Vela, especially, for pointing out, that for...
Thank you for the response. I'm teaching junior and senior level high school physics. I'm not really aware quite what my peer expectations would be, hence, my posting here. I'm trying to educate myself on what may typically be expected by other high school science teachers. In general, I...
I'm in my first year teaching Physics. My students all understand the importance of significant digits and the rules for applying them, but in some more complicated calculations, like multi-step vector component problems that also require unit conversions, it's a bit unclear, even to me, when...