<p>Hi,</p>
<p>Question is in title. I can get simple problems, but most of the medium and hard ones I can't get. I have 2 review books AP Advantage and Barron's. What else should I do beside doing problems and reading answer explanations? Because I am having trouble just starting on a problem. I am clueless on how to start most of the time. It's like a physics problem solving block (like writer's block).</p>
<p>f=ma</p>
<p>that's all you need to know, baby.</p>
<p>Are you sure? I memorized that a long time ago, along with steps and everything. Ever since work and power, I have been having trouble. I was good until Work. I guess practice problems are the only way.</p>
<p>Sometimes knowing units of quantities helps. Occasionally there will be multiple choice questions that will ask for some variable in terms of other variables and some of these choices can be eliminated by dimensional analysis. You don't even need to know a formula to do these.</p>
<p>Lecture #11:
MIT</a> OpenCourseWare | Physics | 8.01 Physics I: Classical Mechanics, Fall 1999 | Video Lectures</p>
<p>If you start with the conservation of mechanical energy, work and power are pretty easy to derive and define. But really the definition of work is not that bad. If you exert a force on an object and move it through a distance, then the work done is just the sum of the pieces of the force times the small change in position of that object (we take the parallel component of the force for obvious reasons).</p>
<p>Of course the real motivation behind defining work is to connect it to the concept of energy. I mean the work integral is easy to use but the equation Work = change in KE is most important. You don't really have to worry too much about the theory. Energy is pretty hard to grasp but basically you need to know that it's conserved and how to calculate the different forms (the derivations aren't bad).</p>
<p>Newton's 3 Laws and Maxwell's Equations. Understand all of the above and you'll be good for both Mech and E&M</p>
<p>Question: why would some people want to only take only the mech part?</p>
<p>archrival, barrons helps but you need to solve dozens fo problems and Barrons has only a limited set under any given topic. pick up "Schaums
3000 problems in Physics" from a local library or talk to your physics teacher
at school to give you more (usually they will be happy to oblige).</p>
<p>xtra, my reason for doing only mech.....
I had never taken physics before and was
self studying via the EPGY online. Though getting the 5 on the AP was nowhere near the difficulty I was hyperventilating about, working through
OCW psets and EPGY finals were challenging enough to consume a lot of time
and not leave me enough to tackle E&M. </p>
<p>Also, I find doing the MV calc in parallel helps me with concepts on E&M and last year as a Junior I was only doing Calc BC (not MV calc) and am glad I
decided not to do E&M last year.</p>
<p>:)</p>
<p>to xtra, because the AP Physics C classes at most school don't even finish teaching the E&M section. If you look at the stats (available on College Board), about two times as many students take the mechanics exam compared to the E&M in the US. that means about half of all the physics C students don't even try the E&M</p>
<p>god point; so I am self studying Mech by myself, for the next one week.</p>