BFMracing
General Category => General Board => Homework Haven => Topic started by: Sandoz on September 08, 2012, 01:21:27 PM
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Good grief, only 1 mark awarded for all that! And there's so much working needed to sort it all out!
I might attempt this if you need a solution - or are you just setting this to see who wants to do it?
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a simple vector problem, a little geometry and trig will take care of it.
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Good grief, only 1 mark awarded for all that! And there's so much working needed to sort it all out!
The life of a college student studying engineering! You bleed, sweat, and cry over each problem; babying it until you adopt it as your child. You look it over; interpreting it; checking it; recognize each angle, component, and force by name; making sure it is everything you expect! All for one mark.
...Then you move on to the next problem to attempt adoption!
very well put
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It seems there's a very different approach to problem-setting in the US from at least my university. All those awkward numbers... does it really add anything to the problem? Maybe some more practice with a calculator, and a test of patience.
Anyway, thanks for sharing, nice to see how things are done across the pond.
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It seems there's a very different approach to problem-setting in the US from at least my university. All those awkward numbers... does it really add anything to the problem? Maybe some more practice with a calculator, and a test of patience.
Anyway, thanks for sharing, nice to see how things are done across the pond.
More like a thing of Engineering nowadays... I've felt somewhat similar when I go to some of my classes (good thing I already finished the basic picky-with-numbers ones already). At most, I leave results as fractions, keeping more the integrity of the answer imo, but they always ask for decimals...
As for calculators... I agree with you completely :siderofl: Around half my colleagues use TI's for exams while I go for mental calculus or a simple scientific calculator...
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I'm not convinced there's an easier way of solving this problem - it seems that all the information provided will be needed at some point. It's the nature of the problem that is different from what I'm used to. I tend to get asked problems like "a ball of mass m moving at an initial speed v takes t seconds to reach speed zero in the presence of a force F...". I might dig up one of them to show you what I mean - few if any numbers involved at all.
The original question looks doable but with all those numbers you could get very bogged down in the arithmetic which seems rather off-putting if ever you get slightly lost. Well, I say it looks doable anyway but I haven't put pen to paper on it yet.
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Out of interest, what's the age group that this is aimed at? First year of university/ college/ 18 years old?
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Don't worry, it is normal. Engineering will give you plenty of things to dislike. :bang: :bang: :bang:
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I asked mainly so I can find an equivalent question from the same year in my university here - not to say "Oh look, these are the questions I do!" or anything (because in my first year at university I couldn't do these, lol!) but mainly to compare the different style of questions. Ideally it would be from an engineering paper but I don't seem to have access to those currently. I might put one up from a first-year physics paper some time soon.
As far as vectors go, I started to love them about a year or so ago, but funnily enough that was also the same time that I stopped doing the number work with them! The algebra of vectors can be quite wonderful and elegant. Switch to math, Sandoz, and save yourself from engineering tedium... do it!!