Physics Moments Exam Revision

Hello, my name is Jon and I created this site to help AS and A-level students who are revising for their Physics exams.

The focus of this site is on forces and moments. Moments are forces which I learnt with during my AS-level, so I hope you can find this site useful in your revision.

A popular question in the forces exam, moments questions are usually presented as a diagram with a horizontal bar and a pivot placed under it.

Forces are then added to the diagram at different positions and angles, it is then up to you to complete the missing value - either angle, distance or force. These questions are best approached by calculating the total force on each side of the pivot.

Forces acting at an angle to a pivot need to be re-calculated so only their vertical component is present, this can be done using some simple trigonometry.

Simply use the following to calculate the vertical force:

The sinθ added to the equation acts as a ratio-type variable to the equation, reducing the force as the angle is altered. You can imagine that a force acting at an angle of 90° would result in no force affecting the pivot vertically, this can be a useful piece of information when you come to check your answers later in the exam.

The sites now live, so get exploring! Coming soon is the revision tool feature, this will help you revise all those moments related physics questions that could appear on your exam.

This site is an extension and evolution of my old site which was a simple web page containing notes from a physics A-level presentation I made to my class. I thought it would be useful to my friends to upload the information to a web page to act as a useful guide. I hope this update will make revising moments easier, and faster.