Let’s see how much you’ve picked up with these experiments and the reading – answer as best as you can. (No peeking at the answers until you’re done!) Just relax and see what jumps to mind when you read the question. You can also print these out and jot down your answers in your science notebook.
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1. If I’m talking about simple machines, what does load mean?
2. So what does effort mean when it comes to simple machines?
3. With the pulleys, as your effort got less and less, what happened to the amount of string you had to pull?
4. What is mechanical advantage?
For Advanced Students:
Warning: the following questions are “mathy”. Don’t worry about these if it gets in the way of your enjoyment or understanding of the lesson.
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5. If a lever had a mechanical advantage of 10 and you wanted to lift a 50 pound watermelon, how many pounds of force would you have to use for the effort?
6. If a pulley had a mechanical advantage of 500 and you wanted to lift a 2000 pound hippo, how many pounds of force would you have to use for the effort?
7. Same hippo different units. Newtons are the official unit of force. So to do this officially, a 2000 pound hippo would take about 9000 Newtons to lift. If you lift that hippo 2 meters, how much work did you do? Remember, work is force x distance.
8. One last question. This one’s a little tricky. So if you lifted the hippo 2 meters, how much chain (because string’s not going to cut it) did you pull?
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