GENERAL PHYSICS 1 SAMFORD UNIVERSITY – WEEK 11

At the end of this worksheet you should be able to

• calculate the new quantities of pressure, gauge pressure, and density.

• apply the new principles of Pascal, Archimedes, and Bernoulli.

• use the continuity principle to solve for an unknown quantity.

• use the hydrostatic pressure principle to solve for an unknown quantity.

You will want to keep the following table of densities from your textbook handy.

1. If 500 N person stands on one foot that has an area 50.0 cm2 , what is the pressure on
the floor? If this person stands on their heel in a high heeled shoe that has an area of
1.00 cm2 , what pressure is there? What if this person stands on a diamond that is cut to
have a bottom facet that is 10 000 µm2 (1 µm = 10−6 m)? (Careful with unit conversions!).

1
GENERAL PHYSICS 1 SAMFORD UNIVERSITY – WEEK 11

2. A patient’s systolic blood pressure when resting is 160 mmHg. What is this pressure in
pascals, psi, and atm?

3. Throughout this worksheet and the homework gauge pressure is a way of expressing the
pressure measured by an instrument relative to the atmospheric pressure. So 1 atm of
absolute pressure is set to 0 atm of gauge pressure. Perfect vacuum is absolute zero
pressure, so that would be −1 atm of gauge pressure. So what is 2 atm of gauge pressure
as absolute pressure? 30 kPa of absolute pressure is what gauge pressure? What about
a gauge pressure of 1000 kPa as absolute pressure?

4. In a hydraulic lift, the radius of the smaller piston is 2 cm and the radius of the larger
piston is 20 cm. What weight can the larger piston support when a force of 250 N is applied
to the smaller piston? If the larger piston moves 5 cm, how far does the small piston
move?

2
GENERAL PHYSICS 1 SAMFORD UNIVERSITY – WEEK 11

5. At the surface of a freshwater lake, the air pressure is 1 atm. At what depth under the
water is the absolute pressure 4 atm?

6. At sea level, the average atmospheric pressure is 1 atm. The density of air at this level
is about 1.29 kg/m3 . Assuming the density of air is constant (its not but just go with it),
what is the air pressure at the Empire State Building that has a height of 381 m at the top
deck, and we will just assume that its base is at sea level?

7. A diver swims to a depth of 10 meters in a lake. What is the pressure on the diver’s body?
What is the force on the diver’s eardrums from the water if the area of the eardrum is
0.60 cm2 ? What would this be if the diver was swimming in sea water? (Ignore the fact
that there is atmospheric pressure inside the eardrum, but also think about this problem
if you didn’t ignore that fact.)

3
GENERAL PHYSICS 1 SAMFORD UNIVERSITY – WEEK 11

8. A 5000 N object is floating in fresh water.

• What is the net force on the object?

• What is the magnitude of the buoyant force?

• If the bottom of the object is 1 meter below the surface of the water, then what
pressure is on the bottom of the object?

• What is the area of the bottom surface of the object?

• If the object has another 1 m sticking out of the water, then what is the volume of
the object?

• What is its density?

4
GENERAL PHYSICS 1 SAMFORD UNIVERSITY – WEEK 11

9. The following cylindrical barrels are filled to the brim with fluids of the given density. Put
these in order from smallest to largest pressure at the bottom of the barrel.

(a) R = 40 cm, h = 80 cm, ρ = 1000 kg/m3

10. Let’s do a problem based on the famous Archimedes legend. The story goes that a King
Hiero II of Syracuse commissioned an ornate golden crown to be made, but when he got
it, he was suspicious that silver had been mixed in with the gold. He charged Archimedes
to figure out how to determine the density of the crown without damaging it. Archimedes’
“Eureka” moment came when he realized he could determine the volume of a complex
shape by submerging it in a tub of water that had been filled to the brim. The amount of
water that spilled over the edge would be equal to the volume of the crown as long as
you could catch all of the spilled water and measure its volume. So with all of that said,
suppose the amount of water that spilled over the edge weighed 1.0 N but there was still
some water stuck to the sides of the bucket that didn’t get weighed so maybe call it 1.1 N
I don’t know this is pretty messy. The crown itself weighed 24.1 N. So what is the density
of the crown and how does it compare to gold? Hint: what is the volume of water that
spilled over the edge?

5
GENERAL PHYSICS 1 SAMFORD UNIVERSITY – WEEK 11

11. The above story is ridiculous. What if the water that spilled over the edge had weighed
1.2 N or 1.0 N? This is far too imprecise for something as serious as an allegation of cheat-
ing the king out of a pure gold crown. So instead we want to measure the buoyant force
on the crown. So, if you weight the crown to be 24.1 N and then you lower it into the
water fully submerged and weight it then (by tying a string to it and lowering it into the
water but the string is attached to a balance) and then its “weight” is 22.85 N. What is the
buoyant force upward on the crown? What volume of water has been displaced? What
is the volume of the crown? What is the density of the crown? What is better about this
method?

12. “ICEBERG DEAD AHEAD!” It is sometimes said that only 10% of an iceberg’s volume actually
sticks out above the surface of the water which is what made it so deadly to poor Jack
and Rose on the Titanic. If the density of ice is 917 kg/m3 and the density of seawater
is 1025 kg/m3 , then what is the ratio of the volume of ice under the water to the entire
volume of ice? What is the ratio of the volume of ice above the water to the entire volume
of ice? Next work these in general for any density of object floating in any density of fluid.

13. An artery has an inner diameter of 1.5 mm, but narrows to an inner diameter of 1.0 mm
due to a build up of plaque. By what percent does the speed of blood flow change when
it enters the narrow section?

6
GENERAL PHYSICS 1 SAMFORD UNIVERSITY – WEEK 11

14. What if we have a case where a single pipe splits into many pipes? Following an example
from the textbook, the aorta is the artery from your heart that feeds 32 other major
arteries. The aorta has an inner radius of 1 cm and assume each of the other arteries has
an inner radius of 0.21 cm. If blood in the aorta has an average speed of 28 cm/s, then
what is the average speed of blood in the major arteries? Hint: you can just treat the
major arteries as one big pipe that has an area 32 times bigger than the area of a single
artery.

15. Suppose it takes one minute to fill a 5 gallon bucket with water from your garden hose
that is open all the way. The diameter of your hose is 1 inch. How fast is water traveling
out of the end of the hose? How fast does it travel if you hold your thumb over the end
of the hose and cover half of the area of the hose? (1 inch=0.0254 m, 1 gallon=0.003 78 m3 ,
1 min=60 s)

16. Show that Bernoulli’s Principle really just reduces to the equation for pressure as a result
of gravity when the fluid is not flowing (so v1 = v2 = 0). This equation is now the same
as the hydrostatic pressure equation.

7
GENERAL PHYSICS 1 SAMFORD UNIVERSITY – WEEK 11

17. A cylindrical container of water is full to the brim when a hole is punctured 0.5 m from
the top. What is the speed of the water as it comes out of the hole?

18. Following up on the previous problem, if you redirected this water straight up with the
same speed, how high would it rise?

19. Water flows horizontally through a hose that has a radius of 1 cm at a speed of 2 m/s.
If the nozzle of the hose narrows to 0.25 cm as the water sprays out, then what is the
pressure inside the hose? What is it as a gauge pressure?

8
GENERAL PHYSICS 1 SAMFORD UNIVERSITY – WEEK 11

9
GENERAL PHYSICS 1 SAMFORD UNIVERSITY – WEEK 11