All key terms

Physics · KS3 to A Level

Physics Key Terms

Every word a physics department teaches, Year 7 to A Level, in one A4 book. Each key stage gets its own pages: the terms grouped the way they are taught rather than alphabetically, a definition that fits on two lines, and a worked example beside almost every one. Each key stage opens on one large drawing instead of a list: a crate pushed against friction at Key Stage 3, a free body diagram with a resultant force at GCSE, a vector resolved into components alongside a satellite's orbit at A Level — three genuinely different drawings, because the curriculum teaches three genuinely different ideas of a force, not one picture redrawn three times. GCSE then follows the DfE's own physics content in order: forces and motion, energy, waves and the electromagnetic spectrum, electricity, magnetism and electromagnetism, the particle model of matter, atomic structure, and space physics; A Level adds mechanics, the mechanical properties of materials, electric circuits, thermal physics, quantum and nuclear physics, and fields and electromagnetic induction. Nineteen small diagrams are drawn where a sentence will not do, including a wave's amplitude and wavelength, alpha, beta and gamma penetrating different barriers, and a force-extension graph. Then a page on using the words: the ones the assessment itself is written in, the false friends that mean something else in a physics classroom, the same point written weakly and then properly, and what each word becomes at the next key stage.