SEE ATTACHMENT FOR SUPPLEMENTARY FORMULA SHEET!Often, in Physics or any other Science, the maths questions are the hardest. Where do I even start? Which formulas should I apply? How do I know if I’m using the right method?
There’s no way that you are always going to know how to attack a question, when you first look at it. No matter how many past papers you’ve done, you’ll still get questions that absolutely stump you. Therefore, it is really useful to go into any exam with a method for dealing with tricky questions, especially ones where you don’t even know where to start.
Follow these simple steps to make sure you gain at least a few marks, if not full marks, from literally any maths question in Science!
At the bottom, I have attached a "Supplementary" formula sheet for Physics, with formulas not found on your Formulas sheet! A special thank you goes out to Happy Physics Land, for helping me put it together!
1. Write out the information you are given in Scientific terms, and identify what you are trying to find. This is by far the easiest step, as it hardly requires any thinking at all. When I say Scientific terms, I mean the units/notation used in the formulas on your formula sheet. The importance of this step is to allow you to easily decide which formulas to use, by checking which pieces of information you have and using whichever formula seems to work.
Let’s use a Projectile Motion question as an example.
A toy bird is launched at an angle of 600 to the horizontal, and just hits the base of a cliff above it. The cliff is 60m above the toy bird initially, and 40 away (horizontally) from the toy bird initially. Find the initial velocity of the toy bird.So, let’s rewrite the information we have in Scientific terms, as well as identify what we are trying to find.
Great! Now, later on in the question, it will become super easy to figure out which formulas to use.
2. Apply any mathematical steps that you just HAVE to do, depending on the question typeMost questions just require you to take certain steps. Particularly, in Projectile motion it is common for students to be required to draw a triangle to discern the initial velocities in the horizontal and vertical directions.
In this case, that will look like this:
Now, we can start to attack the actual question!
3. Apply whichever formulas seem to incorporate as many pieces of information as possible!Once you’ve done the two above step, you can answer any question with intuitive guess-and-check (for questions which you have no idea how to approach). For instance, in the above question I can see that we have an x distance and an initial velocity in the x direction, therefore I can apply the formula
Okay, now I don’t know if this is useful in any way or not, but let’s just to apply another formula that incorporates more information and see what happens.
Let’s see if
Is useful at all!
+\frac{1}{2} (-9.8) (\frac{40}{ucos60})^2)
))
Amazing! By literally just randomly subbing in numbers, we got to an answer! The trick is to select equations that seem to contain the information you’ve been given.
4. Think about units and significant figures.This step is absolutely crucial to any student looking for full marks. Make sure you’ve used the number of significant figures that equates to the LOWEST you’ve been given, and that your units are in standard SI units.
In this question, the answer could either be
(2 sig figs)
Or
(1 sig fig)
Depending on whether you decide that the values are to 1 or 2 significant figures. Both are correct, but just make sure to put the number of sig figs you used in brackets after the answer.
And there you have it! A foolproof way to attack any maths question in Physics, or any other Science subject!
To ask a question, just make an ATAR Notes account here.
and post it below! I'd be happy to help out in any way I can 
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