NY Regents Physics study guide
NY Regents Physics · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
The Physical Setting/Physics Regents Examination is a New York State Regents examination in physics, administered by the New York State Education Department as part of its high school Regents examination program. It is intended for high school students who have completed a course in physics aligned to the State's physical setting standards, and the results are used toward Regents diploma requirements. The exam samples the major content strands of introductory physics: mechanics, energy, electricity and magnetism, waves, and modern physics. NYSED's public pages list Regents Exams under Assessments and provide exam schedules, but the specific physics page was not reachable when this summary was compiled, so details such as item counts, time limits, and scoring scales are not stated here. The NY Regents Physics study guide has 5 sections and about 1,756 words.
01Mechanics
Mechanics on the Regents exam rewards careful attention to vectors and reference frames . Know the distinction between scalar quantities (distance, speed, mass, time) and vector quantities (displacement, velocity, acceleration, force, momentum).
368 words, about 2 min02Energy
Energy questions test whether you can track energy between forms and apply conservation. Work is done when a force causes displacement in the direction of the force; a force perpendicular to motion (like the normal force on a level floor, or tension in a string on a circling object) does zero work.
359 words, about 2 min03Electricity and Magnetism
This domain combines electrostatics, circuits, and magnetism . Coulomb's law describes the force between point charges: it grows with the product of the charges and falls off with the square of the distance.
325 words, about 2 min04Waves
Wave questions test the relationship among speed, frequency, and wavelength and how waves behave at boundaries. The universal wave equation is v = fλ.
350 words, about 2 min05Modern Physics
Modern physics covers the quantum nature of light, atomic models, and nuclear reactions . The photon model holds that light comes in discrete packets of energy E = hf, so higher-frequency light (like ultraviolet) carries more energy per photon than lower-frequency light (like red).
354 words, about 2 min