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 countries of the world, happens at high school (or secondary school) level. The present book, which is the second volume of the series, deals with the topic of ‘Electromagnetism’ at introductory level.
With almost 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.
• Practice, practice, practice: Each chapter contains a large corpus of carefully designed exercises, which are further subdivided into ‘Very Short’, ‘Short Answer’ and ‘Long Answer’ type questions. These exercises also contain a broad range of objective-type questions, which 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 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.
• Illustrative examples Many examples are included that explain the applications of rules such as right-hand thumb rule and Fleming’s left/right hand rules, which many students find difficult to use.
• 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 useful features, each book of the series 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.