Reading battery voltage from oscilloscope display

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J89
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Homework Statement



Your lab partner is opening and closing the tap switch to turn on and off the voltage from a battery. If you see the following trace on the screen and the VOLTS/DIV knob is set to 0.5 V and the TIME/DIV dial is set to 2s/DIV, you can tell that the voltage of the battery is approximately how many volts?


Homework Equations


No known equations that I know of...



The Attempt at a Solution



Well we know that the y-axis is all together .5 volts, and the x-axis is 2 seconds..so it would common to just multiply .5 by 2..however, it's not one of the choices. So I thought that in the graph since there are three tick marks, you would divide .5/3 and 2/3 and then multiply that together..still did not get it correct..I don't know what I am doing wrong, that was how I was shown it was done.
 
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  • Oscilloscope screen showing a square-wave trace with a repeating pulse train: the signal sits high at the top of the grid, drops to a lower baseline, and repeats at regular intervals across the display.
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J89 said:
Well we know that the y-axis is all together .5 volts, and the x-axis is 2 seconds..so it would common to just multiply .5 by 2.

Time scale is unrelated to the problem.

So I thought that in the graph since there are three tick marks, you would divide .5/3 and 2/3 and then multiply that together..still did not get it correct..I don't know what I am doing wrong, that was how I was shown it was done.

Your signal seems to be almost three ticks high, doesn't it? And there is 0.5V per tick, yes?

That's not different from using a ruler to measure something.