GCSE Physics revision (AQA, Edexcel, OCR)

Energy sits in stores and moves between them — by forces, currents, heating and radiation — and the total never changes. Examiners want you to name the stores, follow the transfers, count what is wasted, and finish with efficiency, power and specific heat capacity calculations that carry their units.

Where does a country’s energy actually come from? Fossil fuels, nuclear fuel and a growing crowd of renewables — each with its own reliability, environmental cost and best use. Learn the comparison table, argue both sides, and finish with kilowatt-hour calculations straight off a domestic bill.

Every circuit question reduces to a handful of rules: current is charge per second, potential difference drives it, resistance opposes it, series shares the p.d., parallel shares the current. Learn the rules, read the I–V graphs, and the required practicals become routine.

The mains in your wall is alternating current at 230 V, wired live–neutral–earth and protected by fuses — and the National Grid shuttles the power across the country at 400 000 V to keep losses down. Follow the energy from power station to plug, then meet the static electricity that separate Physics adds.

Matter is particles: packed tight in solids, sliding in liquids, flying free in gases. Density counts how tightly, latent heat counts the energy to break the arrangement apart, and gas pressure counts the collisions. One model explains melting, boiling, compression and a shrink-wrapped tin collapsing.

The atom took a century of arguments to map: a tiny nucleus of protons and neutrons with electrons in shells. Isotopes are the same element with different neutron counts — and the unstable ones power reactors and smoke alarms. Follow the model’s history, then read nuclide notation like a native.

Unstable nuclei cannot stay as they are: they throw out alpha, beta or gamma radiation until they settle. Learn each radiation’s punch and reach, write nuclear equations that balance, and read half-life graphs the way hospitals and archaeologists both do.

A force is a push or pull — and the resultant is all that matters. Read distance–time and velocity–time graphs like a story, apply a = Δv ÷ t and F = m a, and let Newton’s three laws explain everything from kick-off to terminal velocity.

Stopping a car takes two stages: the thinking distance your reaction time buys the speed, and the braking distance that grows with the square of it. Double the speed and the total more than doubles — the physics behind every speed limit.

Momentum is mass in motion — conserved in every collision and explosion. The safety trick inside every car is the same: stretch the stopping time so the huge change in momentum happens with a smaller force. One conservation law explains crashes, cannons and air bags.

Pushing, lifting and stretching all come down to one idea: work done is energy transferred. Hooke’s law says springs stretch in proportion to the pull — until they don’t — and power tells you how fast the transfer happens.

A force can do more than push in a line — it can turn. Moments measure the turning effect, balanced systems obey one simple see-saw law, and levers and gears trade distance for force so a small push can shift a heavy load.

Squeeze the same force into a smaller area and the pressure soars. In fluids, pressure pushes at right angles to every surface, grows with depth, and buoys up floating objects with an upthrust equal to the weight of fluid pushed aside.

Waves move energy without moving matter: ripples cross a pool while each drop of water just bobs. One equation — v = f λ — runs the whole topic, from echo-sounded seafloors to the S-wave shadows that reveal Earth’s liquid core.

Seven waves, one speed: from radio to gamma, every electromagnetic wave crosses empty space at 3 × 10⁸ m/s. Shorter wavelength means more energy — and more danger. Hot things glow, and the hotter they are the harder they radiate.

Light travels in straight lines until a lens or a boundary bends it. Lenses converge or diverge rays to make real images on screens or virtual ones in magnifying glasses; filters and surfaces decide the colours your eye receives.

Electricity and magnetism are two views of one thing: currents make magnetic fields, moving magnets make currents. That single loop of cause and effect runs motors, microphones, loudspeakers — and every transformer on the National Grid.

Gravity writes the whole story of space: it gathers dust into stars, holds planets in orbits, and its story written in starlight — red-shift — tells us the universe itself is expanding from a single hot beginning.