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Answers To Assessment Questions: 12 Sound Waves

This document contains the answers to multiple choice and free response questions about sound waves and ultrasound. It defines key terms like amplitude, wavelength, frequency, and vibration. It also explains how different instruments produce sound and how ultrasound is used, such as by ships to measure water depth and in medicine to scan unborn babies. Various sources of sound are listed with their measured noise levels in decibels.

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William Chong
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400 views2 pages

Answers To Assessment Questions: 12 Sound Waves

This document contains the answers to multiple choice and free response questions about sound waves and ultrasound. It defines key terms like amplitude, wavelength, frequency, and vibration. It also explains how different instruments produce sound and how ultrasound is used, such as by ships to measure water depth and in medicine to scan unborn babies. Various sources of sound are listed with their measured noise levels in decibels.

Uploaded by

William Chong
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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C HAP T ER 12 SOUND WAVES

Answers to assessment questions


Question 1 (B) Question 2 (A) Question 3 (A) Question 4 (D) Question 5 (C)
Question 6 (C) Question 7 (D) Question 8 (B) Question 9 (D) Question 10 (C)
Question 11 (C) Question 12 (A) Question 13 (A) Question 14 (D)

Question 15
a) A vibration is a backwards and forwards movement.
b) A violin produces sound when its strings vibrate. The vibrating strings and the surrounding wooden
body of the violin make the air around vibrate and so create sound waves.
c) The sound from a violin travels through the air in the form of sound waves, created by the vibrating
strings and wooden body of the violin.
d) The term frequency refers to the number of complete sound waves produced in one second.
e) The unit of frequency is the hertz (Hz).
f) The higher the frequency of a note, the higher the pitch of the sound.
g) Ultrasound is high-frequency sounds. These have a frequency too high for human ears to detect.
h) Ships use ultrasound to find out the depth of water beneath them by sending down pulses of ultrasound.
The longer it takes for the echo to come back, the deeper the sea bed.

Question 16
guitar—strings; drum—skin; piano—wires; flute—air tube; voice—vocal cords; tuning fork—prongs;
loudspeaker—paper cone; bumble bee—wings

Question 17
whisper—20; normal talking—60; loud rock band—110; silence—0; vacuum cleaner—70; traffic—80;
close thunder—90; pneumatic drill—110; rocket taking off—160

Question 18
a) A vacuum is a completely empty space. It lacks even air.
b) The bell cannot be heard when the air is pumped from the jar because there are no particles to vibrate
and create sound waves.
c) Your ears tell which direction sound is coming from because they can sense which ear is nearer the
sound.
d) It is more difficult to tell where sound is coming from in water because there are more particles to vibrate
and the sound waves travel faster.
e) The wavelength of a sound is the length of one complete sound wave, or the distance from a point on
a wave to the exact same point on the next wave.

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PHYSICS

f) The other piece of equipment you would need in order to display a sound wave on the screen of an
oscilloscope is a microphone.
g) The image of the wave on the screen is called a waveform.
h) The diagram below shows the wavelength and amplitude of the wave.

wavelength

amplitude

amplitude

i) The diagram above also shows a wave that has a smaller amplitude than the sound wave in the diagram.
Any reasonable drawing in which the two crests of the wave are below those of the one in the diagram
is correct.
j) The sound produced by the wave with smaller amplitude would be less loud/quieter/have a lower volume
than the wave with the larger amplitude.

Question 19
a) Ultrasound is sound that is above the hearing range of humans (above about 20,000 Hz).
b) Animals that use ultrasound for communication, navigation or to find their food include bats, dolphins,
and mice. Dogs can also detect ultrasounds.
c) The sea is 1560 metres deep at that point (Remember the 2 seconds is the time taken for the pulse of
sound to go down to the sea bed and be reflected back as an echo).
d) If the ship was in a lake and the echo came back in 4 seconds, the lake would be 2 x 1497 = 2994 metres
deep.
e) It is important for the echo-locating machine on the ship to know what kind of water the ship is in
because the speed of sound varies in different types of water, and therefore the time taken for an echo
to return will vary.
f) Medical uses of ultrasound include scanning pregnant mothers to check the development of the unborn
baby, cleaning badly coated teeth, and breaking up kidney stones.

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