A-Level Physics Tutor

A-Level Physics has one of the lowest proportions of top grades of any A-Level, and the reason is not that the ideas are impossibly hard. It is that the papers demand three things at once: solid understanding of the concepts, confident mathematics (including some calculus and logarithms), and precise written explanations. A student who is weak in any one of the three will find the paper unforgiving.

Mr. Ahmad’s A-Level Physics lessons deal with all three. Concepts are taught with diagrams and derivations so the equations make sense; the mathematics is taught directly rather than assumed; and explanation questions are practised with the board’s mark schemes until the student writes the way examiners want to read. Practical skills — uncertainties, graphs, log plots and evaluation — are built in throughout, since they appear in every paper and not only in the practical assessment.

Syllabus topics covered

• Mechanics — kinematics, projectiles, forces and moments, momentum and impulse, work, energy and power, circular motion, simple harmonic motion
• Materials — density, Hooke’s law, Young modulus, stress-strain curves, viscosity and Stokes’ law
• Waves and optics — superposition, standing waves, diffraction gratings, polarisation, refraction and total internal reflection, the photoelectric effect and wave-particle duality
• Electricity — current and resistance, potential dividers, EMF and internal resistance, capacitors and exponential discharge
• Fields — gravitational, electric and magnetic fields, Coulomb’s law, capacitance, electromagnetic induction, particle accelerators
• Nuclear, thermal and astrophysics — radioactivity and decay, binding energy, fission and fusion, ideal gases and kinetic theory, stellar physics, cosmology and the option topics

Frequently asked questions