Class 12 Physics Current Electricity: NCERT Solutions for Question 12

At room temperature (27.0 °C) the resistance of a heating element is 100 Ω. What is the temperature of the element if the resistance is found to be 117 Ω, given that the temperature coefficient of the material of the resistor is 1.70 x 10^-4 °C^-1

Determine the current in each branch of the network shown in figure

The number density of free electrons in a copper conductor estimated in Example 3.1 is 8.5 x 10²⁸ m^-3. How long does an electron take to drift from one end of a wire 3.0 m long to its other end? The area of cross-section of the wire is 2.0 x 10^-6 m² and it is carrying a current of 3.0 A.

A silver wire has a resistance of 2.1 Ω at 27.5 °C, and a resistance of 2.7 Ω at 100 °C. Determine the temperature coefficient of resistivity of silver.

(a) Three resistors 1 Ω, 2 Ω, and 3 Ω are combined in series. What is the total resistance of the combination?

(b) If the combination is connected to a battery of emf 12 V and negligible internal resistance, obtain the potential drop across each resistor.

A battery of emf 10 V and internal resistance 3 Ω is connected to a resistor. If the current in the circuit is 0.5 A, what is the resistance of the resistor? What is the terminal voltage of the battery when the circuit is closed?

A storage battery of emf 8.0 V and internal resistance 0.5 Ω is being charged by a 120 V dc supply using a series resistor of 15.5 Ω. What is the terminal voltage of the battery during charging? What is the purpose of having a series resistor in the charging circuit?

 (a) Three resistors 2 Ω, 4 Ω and 5 Ω are combined in parallel. What is the total resistance of the combination?

(b) If the combination is connected to a battery of emf 20 V and negligible internal resistance, determine the current through each resistor, and the total current drawn from the battery.

A heating element using nichrome connected to a 230 V supply draws an initial current of 3.2 A which settles after a few seconds to a steady value of 2.8 A. What is the steady temperature of the heating element if the room temperature is 27.0 °C? Temperature coefficient of resistance of nichrome averaged over the temperature range involved is 1.70 x 10^-4 °C ^-1.

Answer the following questions regarding earth's magnetism:

(a) A vector needs three quantities for its specification. Name the three independent quantities conventionally used to specify the earth's magnetic field.

(b) The angle of dip at a location in southern India is about 18º.

Would you expect a greater or smaller dip angle in Britain?

(c) If you made a map of magnetic field lines at Melbourne in Australia, would the lines seem to go into the ground or come out of the ground?

(d) In which direction would a compass free to move in the vertical plane point to, if located right on the geomagnetic north or south pole?

(e) The earth's field, it is claimed, roughly approximates the field due to a dipole of magnetic moment 8 x 1022 J T^-1 located at its centre. Check the order of magnitude of this number in some way.

(f ) Geologists claim that besides the main magnetic N-S poles, there are several local poles on the earth's surface oriented in different directions. How is such a thing possible at all?

(a) Two stable isotopes of lithium 6Li3 and7Li3 have respective abundances of 7.5% and 92.5%. These isotopes have masses 6.01512 u and 7.01600 u, respectively. Find the atomic mass of lithium.

(b) Boron has two stable isotopes, ¹⁰B₅ and ¹¹B₅ . Their respective masses are 10.01294 u and 11.00931 u, and the atomic mass of boron is 10.811 u. Find the abundances of  ¹⁰B₅ and ¹¹B₅.

A small candle, 2.5 cm in size is placed at 27 cm in front of a concave mirror of radius of curvature 36 cm. At what distance from the mirror should a screen be placed in order to obtain a sharp image? Describe the nature and size of the image. If the candle is moved closer to the mirror, how would the screen have to be moved?

Figure 8.6 shows a capacitor made of two circular plates each of radius 12 cm, and separated by 5.0 cm. The capacitor is being charged by an external source (not shown in the figure). The charging current is constant and equal to 0.15 A.

(a) Calculate the capacitance and the rate of charge of potential difference between the plates.

(b) Obtain the displacement current across the plates.

(c) Is Kirchhoff’s first rule (junction rule) valid at each plate of the capacitor? Explain.

What is the force between two small charged spheres having charges of 2 x 10^-7 C and 3 x 10^-7 C placed 30 cm apart in air?

Monochromatic light of wavelength 589 nm is incident from air on a water surface. What are the wavelength, frequency and speed of
(a) reflected, and
(b) refracted light? Refractive index of water is 1.33.

Two charges 5 x 10^-8 C and -3 x 10^-8 C are located 16 cm apart. At what point(s) on the line joining the two charges is the electric potential zero? Take the potential at infinity to be zero.

The electrostatic force on a small sphere of charge 0.4 μC due to another small sphere of charge − 0.8 μC in air is 0.2 N.

(a) What is the distance between the two spheres?

(b) What is the force on the second sphere due to the first?

 A toroid has a core (non-ferromagnetic) of inner radius 25 cm and outer radius 26 cm, around which 3500 turns of a wire are wound. If the current in the wire is 11 A, what is the magnetic field (a) outside the toroid, (b) inside the core of the toroid, and (c) in the empty space surrounded by the toroid.

Answer the following questions:
(a) The earths magnetic field varies from point to point in space. Does it also change with time? If so, on what time scale does it change appreciably?
(b) The earths core is known to contain iron. Yet geologists do not regard this as a source of the earths magnetism. Why?
(c) The charged currents in the outer conducting regions of the earths core are thought to be responsible for earths magnetism. What might be the battery (i.e., the source of energy) to sustain these currents?
(d) The earth may have even reversed the direction of its field several times during its history of 4 to 5 billion years. How can geologists know about the earths field in such distant past?
(e) The earths field departs from its dipole shape substantially at large distances (greater than about 30,000 km). What agencies may be responsible for this distortion?
(f ) Interstellar space has an extremely weak magnetic field of the order of 10−12 T. Can such a weak field be of any significant consequence? Explain.
[Note: Exercise 5.2 is meant mainly to arouse your curiosity. Answers to some questions above are tentative or unknown. Brief answers wherever possible are given at the end. For details, you should consult a good text on geomagnetism.]

Explain how Corpuscular theory predicts the speed of light in a medium, say, water, to be greater than the speed of light in vacuum. Is the prediction confirmed by experimental determination of the speed of light in water? If not, which alternative picture of light is consistent with experiment?

A charged particle oscillates about its mean equilibrium position with a frequency of 10⁹ Hz. What is the frequency of the electromagnetic waves produced by the oscillator?

Which of the statements given in Exercise 14.1 is true for p-type semiconductors.

A magnetic dipole is under the influence of two magnetic fields. The angle between the field directions is 60º, and one of the fields has a magnitude of 1.2 x 10^-2T. If the dipole comes to stable equilibrium at an angle of 15º with this field, what is the magnitude of the other field?

A closely wound solenoid 80 cm long has 5 layers of windings of 400 turns each. The diameter of the solenoid is 1.8 cm. If the current carried is 8.0 A, estimate the magnitude of B inside the solenoid near its centre.

Two point charges q_A = 3 μC and q_B = −3 μC are located 20 cm apart in vacuum.

(a) What is the electric field at the midpoint O of the line AB joining the two charges?

(b) If a negative test charge of magnitude 1.5 × 10⁻⁹ C is placed at this point, what is the force experienced by the test charge?