High School Physics: Master It With Ease (1) Introductory Current Electricity

Book Synopsis: The series High School Physics: Master It With Ease has been written for all school students who get their first systematic exposure to the topics of the series, which, in most places, happens at high school (or secondary school) level. The present book, which is the first volume of the series, deals with the topic of Current Electricity at introductory level.With two decades of experience of teaching the subject both at university level and at school-leaving level, the author has strong credentials to understand and mitigate students’ difficulties. He firmly believes that at the formative stage of first exposure to a subject, the students should not be left with any gaps or doubts in their understanding. Accordingly, he has tried to furnish the books with a variety of pedagogical perspectives and wealth of testing material – normal and higher order, numerical and objective – for students to hone their grasp of the fundamentals.Some novel features of the books include:
• Sub-topics of main topic: In general, a main topic of a chapter introduces and discusses several new and different ideas. While teaching in the class, experienced teachers of physics intuitively divide the main topic into sub-topics, each of which deals with a single well-defined idea. We follow this approach and after explicit breakup, develop each discrete idea of a sub-topic to an appropriate detail. The discussion is further supported by a number of properly labelled diagrams and tables.
• Teaching by solved examples: The book contains a plethora of solved examples each one of which is accompanied by a mention of the precise subtopic on which it is based.
• Practice, practice, practice: Each chapter contains a large corpus of carefully designed exercises. Exercises requiring numerical calculations and those requiring subtle higher order thinking are marked explicitly. These exercises contain a broad range of objective-type questions as well. They include ‘Multiple Choice type (MCQs)’, ‘Fill in the Blanks type’, ‘True or False type’, ‘Matching type’ and ‘Quiz type’ questions.
Ample answers, hints and solutions to all these exercises are provided to help students achieve maximum elucidation of each topic.
• Inclusion of Activities: In order to encourage ‘Learning by Doing’, a number of activities are included in many chapters. Each activity can easily be performed by the students by using commonly available material in their homes and school-labs.
• Useful ‘Question Bank’: A ‘Question Bank’ in the question- answer format is included at the end of the book. It contains a large collection of most such questions as find favor with the examiners. Students can use them for revision and consolidation of their studies as well as to learn how to answer different types of questions during their exams.
With all these features, the book is expected to be self-contained textbook, which will benefit students both during self-study as well as for homework and exam work throughout their introductory phase of learning physics.
About the Author Sudhir K. Sood earned his Ph.D. degree in fundamental particle physics from University of Delhi. Subsequently, as a research scientist and Professor of Physics at Universities in France, Canada and India, Dr. Sood has taught a number of courses both at introductory and advanced graduate level. He has lectured at international Physics conferences and authored numerous well-cited research papers that are published in reputed peer-reviewed journals. More recently, for more than a decade, he has taught students in Delhi who wish to specialize in engineering, medicine and physical science courses.