IGCSE PHYSICS RESOURCE: A NOTE ABOUT CALCULATORS

IGCSE Physics Resource

A NOTE ABOUT CALCULATORS

For some of the physics questions you will require a scientific calculator. Here are two common
examples:

There are two buttons in particular that are essential in this course that you won’t find on an
ordinary calculator: the standard form button and the indices button. What these buttons look like
depends upon the calculator (although they do the same thing).

The buttons that are circled red are

the standard form buttons. The
buttons circled blue are the indices
buttons.

We will do some examples with the calculator on the right, as this one is less intuitive. the standard
form button is useful for writing very big numbers or very small numbers. For example, if you
wanted to put 300,000,000 (3 x 108) into the calculator, you would type.

If you wanted to put 0.00000003 (3 x 10-8) into the calculator, you would type:

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IGCSE PHYSICS RESOURCE: A NOTE ABOUT CALCULATORS

The indices buttons are just to make powers. For example, if you needed to put 34 in the calculator,
you could always type 3 x 3 x 3 x 3, but it is much easier to type:

For common indices like squared (x2) and cubed (x3), there is already a button.

You’ll notice that there’s something written in yellow above most of the keys. To access these
functions you just use shift. For example, to get pi (𝜋) you use:

Another useful keyis the ‘Ans’ button. This will recall your last answer, which means you don’t have
to type the number in if you need it again. In fact there are many useful keys on the calculator. We
recommend looking at the manual and spending a bit of time getting to know your calculator.