What this practice covers
These questions are drawn from past CIE 0625 Physics papers and filtered to radioactivity. You answer, you find out immediately whether you were right, and you get the reasoning for the correct option and for each distractor. Wrong answers go to a mistakes locker so you can come back to exactly those.
Practice is free. You need an account only so your progress and your mistakes are still there next time.
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What examiners see students get wrong here
These are the errors that cost marks on radioactivity, taken from our own topic notes. Read them before you practise and you will recognise the traps in the questions.
- Forgetting to subtract the background count.
- Saying alpha is the most penetrating because it is the most ionising.
- Saying gamma is deflected in a magnetic field.
- Saying beta curves the same way as alpha.
- Treating half-life as the time for the sample to decay completely.
- Saying half-life can be changed by heating or by chemical treatment.
- Choosing gamma for thickness monitoring, where the reading would not change.
- Saying alpha is the most dangerous outside the body, or gamma the most dangerous inside it.
Revise it first
If any of the above is unfamiliar, work through the notes before practising: Radioactivity revision notes.