Chapter 5: Temperature Measurements – Sample Activity

Context

In In a remote village where medical facilities are distant, a child falls sick, his temperature rises above the normal and he is rushed to a health facility for medical attention. After treatment, the medical personnel advises that the child be returned home but that his temperature be monitored for some days using locally available materials from the environment.

Support Material

Task As a Physics learner, using locally available materials from the environment, describe guidelines to use in making an instrument to monitor the child’s temperature.

Chapter Summary

In this chapter, you have learnt that:

• Temperature Measurements Temperature is a number that expresses the degree of hotness or coldness of a body on some chosen scale.

Heat is energy in transit from a region of high temperature to a region of lower temperature.

A thermometer is a device used to measure temperature and that a liquid used in a thermometer is called a thermometric liquid. Examples of thermometric liquids are mercury and alcohol.

Mercury is preferred to alcohol for use in thermometres meant for measuring high temperatures.

A fixed point is a temperature at which some physical event always takes place such as the melting of pure ice or the boiling of pure water at one atmosphere pressure.

The Celsius scale has two fixed points of thermometry: the lower fixed point, which is the temperature of pure melting ice (0°C) and the upper fixed point, which is the temperature of pure boiling water at one atmosphere pressure (100°C).

Each thermometer works basing on a particular property that varies continuously and preferably linearly with temperature.

To set up the Celsius scale of temperature, a suitable thermometric property is chosen.

A thermometer on the Celsius scale may be calibrated using the ice-point or the steam point methods.

Heat from the sun reaches our atmosphere through radiation and insolation.

The distribution of temperature depends on numerous factors such as latitude, altitude, location, winds, solar radiation and solar insolation.

Solar insolation is a sudden failure by the solar system to function due to exposure to the sun or excessive heat.