What this practice covers
These questions are drawn from past CIE 0654 Co-ordinated Sciences papers and filtered to waves. 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.
Start practising practice questions →
What examiners see students get wrong here
These are the errors that cost marks on waves, taken from our own topic notes. Read them before you practise and you will recognise the traps in the questions.
- Measuring angles from the surface instead of from the normal.
- Saying light bends because it changes direction, rather than because it changes speed.
- Saying sound travels fastest in air.
- Saying sound can travel through a vacuum.
- Swapping pitch and loudness, or linking pitch to amplitude.
- Saying a wave carries matter along with it.
- Putting the electromagnetic spectrum in the wrong order, especially swapping infrared and ultraviolet, which sit either side of visible light.
Revise it first
If any of the above is unfamiliar, work through the notes before practising: Waves revision notes.