General STEP discussion

A forum for discussing STEP in General

Help!

Forums: 

Help! I think I've done a massively stupid stupid thing on step 1 today...
I answered all my questions and one of the ones i did was question 10 but I think I wrote on the front of the paper that I did question 9!!! Will it be marked as question 9 and I get no marks?!

Help I'm panicking!!

Thanks

During the Exam

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When I'm writing my scripts and drawing diagrams it can sometimes get a bit confusing and I was wondering whether we were allowed to use pens other than black (blue/green etc) to make it clearer? I've looked on the main website and seen nothing about it and nothing is written about it on the front of the paper like other exams.

Thanks

Obscure Facts

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One of the main things that worries me about STEP is that in a lot of questions I end up hitting a road block because I need to use a piece of maths I've never come across before. For example, I did a question yesterday and to make any progress into part 2 I needed to know that arctan(1/x)=pi/2 - arctan(x). This just seems so obscure and I had never seen it before, yet it stopped me in my tracks so I could only get 8/20 on a question. Obviously I know it now, but there seems to be something like this in a lot of questions I try.

FP3 Polar Area question

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r=2(cosθ-sinθ)
r=2((x-y)/r)
r²=2x-2y
...
(x-1)²+(y+1)²=2
so r=√2

So I have two forms to work out the area.

A=πr²
=2π

A=½∫r^2 dθ between 2π and 0
=½∫4(cos²θ-2cosθsinθ+sin²θ) dθ
=2∫(1-sin2θ) dθ
=2[θ+½cos2θ] between 2π and 0
=2[(2π+½)-(½)]
=4π

The answer is 2π so the error is in the polar bit probably something stupid

Mechanics 2 question confusion

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A pebble is throw with a horizontal velocity of 4m/s and has a mass of 3kg (assume not vertical velocity).
The cliff is 51m high.

I went about solving this in the way the question directed you to: Calculate KE and GPE at beginning and then calculate KE at end which gave me 1520 J.
I then used this to calculate the final speed of 31.9 m/s.

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