Pressure and Pascal, Archimedes, surface tension and capillarity, viscosity and Stokes, Poiseuille's fourth-power law and Bernoulli — with the blood-flow physics behind every one.
Unit 1 carries 10 of the 50 physics marks; with eight chapters sharing them, this one averages a little over one (MEC publishes weights by unit, not by chapter). No other physics chapter pays a medical candidate back as directly. The cuff that measures your blood pressure, the fourth-power law that decides how much blood a narrowed artery can carry, the surfactant that keeps a newborn's alveoli open and the wide cannula an anaesthetist reaches for in an emergency are all inside the two scope lines below — and all of them are examinable as plain Grade 11 physics.
The MEC scope line runs: Pressure, surface tension and surface energy, capillary action; Newton's law of viscosity, Stokes' law, Poiseuille's law and Bernoulli's principle, with applications. The two headings below are its two points, in MEC's order.
Three ways it comes. Recall: the unit of surface tension, the excess pressure inside a soap bubble, which Reynolds numbers mean streamline flow, what Bernoulli's principle assumes. Understanding: why a narrower capillary lifts water higher while mercury is pushed down, why the pressure is lowest where a pipe is narrowest, why a gas gets more viscous when heated while a liquid gets less. Application: a hydraulic-lift force, a capillary rise, a terminal velocity from Stokes' law, a continuity-plus-Bernoulli pressure drop, the flow left in an artery whose radius has fallen by a fifth.
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