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The Last Word


Bazza

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Re: The Last Word

 

1. The observation of winter's occurrence in the southern hemisphere during the northern hemisphere's summer should be sufficient to show this moron that it's about the tilting axis.

Full credit.

 

2. According to the Farmer's Almanac, the next full moon is October 26th, actually. The next new quarter looks to be November 14th, when the moon will rise at 11:23 AM. I think it'll be at its highest point in the sky at about 4:30 PM.

Yes, I intentionally gave the wrong date for the full moon, intending to force people who'd memorized the phases to compute rather than recall.

 

Expected answers were framed in terms of sunrise/sunset, since the way I have them work things out is via geometry of the Sun-Earth-Moon arrangement.

 

3. The Doppler Effect is the change in frequency of wavelengths as an object approaches or gets farther away, the way a train whistle sounds higher in pitch as it approaches, then deepens, and gets higher in pitch again as it moves away. Scientists can measure changes in the wavelengths of lights emitted by distant stars, or reflected by distant planets, to tell if they're moving toward or away from us.

Partial credit. The Doppler effect lets you measure the speed of something along the line of sight.

 

4. Newton's third law states that, for every action force, there is an opposite and an equal reaction force. Exhaust in a rocket is forced backwards, causing the opposite reaction of pushing the rocket forward.

Full credit. I was surprised at how many people asserted that the rocket pushed against the ground.

 

5. Waves behave differently depending on what they're moving through. As light consists of waves, passing through a vacuum or oxygenated air will produce different effects on this light. The diffusion of our sun's light, for example, is an effect of a dusty atmosphere with a mixture of nitrogen, carbon dioxide and oxygen. A lack of an atmosphere, or a much thinner atmoshpere, will fail to produce such an absorption, and so the light is more likely to be reflected back as white, as on our moon.

 

Different gases will distort waves differently, and so measuring the light that does escape the atmosphere will give us a picture of what forces acted upon it.

Needed to see "spectral lines" in here, and note that different elements compounds have different patterns of spectral lines, such that those patterns serve as fingerprints of substances.

 

6. I think this has something to do with elliptical orbits and the star's gravity having less of an effect when the planet is on its outward loop, but that doesn't sound right. Kepler only sounds vaguely familiar.

During an elliptical orbit, kinetic energy and gravitational potential energy are converted into each other smoothly as the distance of the satellite from the planet changes; the sum of the two is conserved.

 

Kepler's 2nd Law is a geometrical statement of the principle of conservation of angular momentum.

 

7. Considering "this class" is The Last Word, then I shall expound on the fact that L. Marcus is a kendo aficionado, and has just returned from a tournament. While he didn't win, he did have a wonderful time. :P

Full credit :)

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