Physics catch-up practice test for Year 1 of the liceo scientifico.

Are you in Year 1 and need to make up physics? This is the first-year catch-up exam: 20 questions drawn at random from a bank of 50, on the Year 1 programme, so every attempt is a different test. Scoring works like the TOLC admission tests (+1 correct, −0.25 wrong, 0 blank), and at the end you receive by email the correct answer to every question with your weak points by topic — with an account you see them straight away on this page (the step-by-step solution unlocks with your first lesson).

The catch-up exam is the test an Italian high-school student sits in late August or September to make up a subject failed during the school year; the liceo scientifico is the science-oriented high school.

Test in ItalianThe questions of this simulator are in Italian, as in the real exam.

Test prepared by Gaetano Livornese · Aerospace engineer, Politecnico di Milano · maths and physics tutor · updated 13 October 2026

The Year 1 physics debt almost always comes from a year in which the subject was new and there was little time to settle in: the programme is dense (measurement, vectors, forces, equilibrium of a rigid body, optics) and the catch-up exam at the end of August or beginning of September asks for all of it together, not in pieces as during the year.

One mistake that is not already among the typical ones below concerns Hooke’s law: in the elastic force F = k·Δx, Δx is the extension relative to the spring’s rest length, not its total length. A spring 25 cm long whose rest length is 20 cm has stretched by 5 cm, and anyone who substitutes 25 is off by a factor of five without noticing.

The second is a unit mistake hiding in volumes: 1 m³ is 1000 litres and 1 000 000 cm³, not 100 litres and 10 000 cm³ as you might think from remembering that 1 m = 100 cm; volume conversions have to be cubed, area conversions squared. Anyone who gets this wrong when calculating a density is out by an order of magnitude.

The third concerns the inclined plane: the component of the weight parallel to the plane is F·sin θ, the perpendicular one is F·cos θ, where θ is the angle of the plane to the horizontal — anyone who confuses it with the angle to the vertical swaps sine and cosine and gets both components wrong at once, not just one.

Preparing in practice means doing two or three exercises on each of these three points before the practice test, not going back over the theory from scratch: at the end of August time is short and these three habits are worth more than hours of theory revision.

What the Year 1 catch-up exam really asks

The physics catch-up exam for Year 1 does not fish at random across the whole programme: it is always the same four or five patterns, at textbook difficulty. These are the ones that come back almost every time.

• ✓Resolving a force on an inclined plane into its two components
• ✓The equilibrium of a body hanging from two ropes, or a lever with moments
• ✓A ray passing from one medium to another (Snell’s law), or the image formed by a mirror or a lens
• ✓A unit conversion, usually buried inside another exercise

The mistakes that cost you the grade

You do not fail the September exam because of the hard topics: you fail it because of three or four mechanical mistakes that repeat in every exercise. On this programme they are these.

• ✗Adding the magnitudes of two vectors instead of combining them by components: two forces of 3 N and 4 N give 7 N only if they are parallel and in the same direction
• ✗In a lever, using the wrong distance: what counts is the perpendicular distance from the line of action of the force, not the length of the arm
• ✗Measuring the angles of incidence, reflection and refraction from the surface instead of from the normal: in the laws of optics the angle is always measured from the normal
• ✗Mixing g/cm³ and kg/m³ without converting: the result comes out wrong by a factor of a thousand

What order to revise in

Units of measurement and scientific notation first, and it is not a formality: in Year 1 half the mistakes in the catch-up exam are conversions, not physics. Then vectors, which hold up the rest of the year. Forces, moments and equilibrium after that, and geometric optics last — it is only a few relations (reflection, Snell, the conjugate-points equation) and can be recovered in an evening, but only if vectors and basic trigonometry are solid.