Physics catch-up practice test for Year 4 of the liceo scientifico.
Are you in Year 4 and need to make up physics? This is the fourth-year catch-up exam: 20 questions drawn at random from a bank of 50, on the Year 4 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.
Topics covered by the test
- Mechanical waves and sound (interference, standing waves, dB, Doppler)
- Wave optics: Young, diffraction, gratings
- Electrostatics and direct current: Coulomb, field, potential, Ohm, circuits
- Magnetostatics: B field, Lorentz, Ampere
The Year 4 physics debt is often the heaviest of the four, because the year introduces electrostatics, circuits and magnetism from scratch — topics almost nobody has seen before, unlike kinematics, which partly carries over from earlier years.
One mistake that is not already among the typical ones below concerns decibels: doubling the intensity of a sound does not double the level in decibels. The scale is logarithmic, β = 10 · log₁₀(I/I₀), and doubling I adds only about 3 dB (10 · log₁₀2 ≈ 3), not 10 and not twice the starting value.
The second concerns the Lorentz force on a negative charge: the direction of the force is reversed compared with a positive charge moving with the same velocity in the same field — anyone who applies the right-hand rule and stops there, without checking the sign of the charge, always gets it wrong in the same direction.
The third is about the Doppler effect: the formula changes sign depending on whether the source approaches or recedes from the observer, and vice versa for a moving observer — always using the same sign “because the formula is the same anyway” is the commonest mistake, and also the easiest to avoid: before substituting the numbers, just ask whether the distance between source and observer is growing or shrinking.
To prepare, do one exercise on decibels, one on the Lorentz force with a negative charge and one on Doppler with the source moving away: they are the three cases where the sign or the scale, not the formula, decides the result.
Two worked examples from the test
L'effetto Doppler acustico spiega perché la sirena di un'ambulanza che si avvicina a un osservatore fermo viene percepita...
Solution
Passo 1 — Descrivo il meccanismo. Quando la sorgente si avvicina, ogni fronte d'onda successivo viene emesso da una posizione più vicina all'osservatore rispetto al precedente: i fronti si "accalcano" davanti alla sorgente in movimento.
Passo 2 — Conseguenza sulla lunghezza d'onda percepita. L'accalcarsi dei fronti significa una lunghezza d'onda più corta percepita dall'osservatore, e quindi (essendo costante nel mezzo) una frequenza più alta, cioè un suono più acuto.
Risposta corretta: «con frequenza (tono) più alta rispetto a quando è ferma». La risposta «con velocità del suono maggiore» è un errore comune: l'effetto Doppler cambia la frequenza percepita, non la velocità con cui il suono si propaga nel mezzo, che dipende solo dalle proprietà dell'aria.
Una corda di lunghezza , fissata a entrambi gli estremi, vibra e le onde si propagano su di essa con velocità . Qual è la frequenza della terza armonica (onda stazionaria con tre ventri)?
Solution
Passo 1 — Condizione per le onde stazionarie. Con gli estremi fissi entrano un numero intero di mezze lunghezze d'onda nella corda: quindi
Passo 2 — Frequenza fondamentale.
Passo 3 — Terza armonica.
Se hai risposto hai dato la fondamentale (la prima armonica).
In the online practice test you will find 18 more questions like these; the correct answer to every question arrives by email.
Prefer paper? Download the test as a PDF (20 questions, 5 pages · 95 KB, ready to print). You receive the solutions by email after taking it online.
Download the PDFWhat the Year 4 catch-up exam really asks
The physics catch-up exam for Year 4 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.
- A wave with v = λf, often with the Doppler effect or an intensity in decibels
- The Coulomb force between two charges, or the electric field of a point charge
- A circuit with resistors in series and in parallel to reduce, then Ohm’s law
- A capacitor: capacitance, stored charge and stored energy
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.
- Treating electric field and potential as the same thing: E is a vector measured in N/C, V is a scalar measured in volts
- Adding resistors in parallel as if they were in series — and doing the opposite with capacitors, where the formulas are swapped
- In interference, confusing maxima and minima: the path difference is a whole multiple of λ for maxima, a half-integer multiple for minima
- Forgetting that the Lorentz force is zero when the velocity is parallel to the magnetic field
What order to revise in
Waves and acoustics first, the only self-contained block of the year, quickly out of the way. Then electrostatics, and here it is worth slowing down: charge, field, potential and potential energy are four different things that the textbook presents in twenty pages, and almost all Year 4 mistakes come from not keeping them apart. Circuits and magnetism at the end, once the electrostatics basics are solid.
Is the score not enough?
In 2–3 weeks of targeted revision you can make up the subject: let us look at your results together — the diagnostic is free.