Upper 6th Form Curriculum

A2 Physics

Syllabus Followed: Edexcel

As for AS, the A2 course consists of three units.

Unit 4: Waves and Our Universe

It includes: Circular motion, oscillations, and waves; things that behave partly as waves and partly as particles (quantum duality); the beginning and end of the Universe (Big Bang to Big Crunch?). The exam is a 1 hr 15 min paper.

Unit 5: Fields and Forces

It includes: The gravitational field, the electrostatic field, and the magnetic field; capacitors, electromagnetic induction. The exam is a 1 hour paper. Unit 5 also includes a Practical Examination. This will be similar to the one in the AS course.

Unit 6: Synthesis

It includes: Comparison of the mathematical models we use for springs and capacitors, for various kinds of fields (inverse square law), and for capacitor discharge and radioactive decay (exponentials). The unit finishes with a section on particle accelerators, colliding beam experiments, bubble chamber photographs, and their application to discoveries about elementary particles.

The exam, which is 2 hours long, will firstly contain a passage analysis, in which you will read a passage and answer physics questions on it. Secondly, it will contain questions partly on the topics mentioned above, and partly on any other topic from the entire course.

The intellectual demands of the A2 are naturally greater than those for AS. Some of the concepts will be a greater strain on your imagination; you will need to become confident with the use of natural logarithms and exponentials. By the end of the course, you will begin to see the extent to which the human mind has managed to reduce the complexity of the physical world to a small number of beautifully simple ideas.

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