Physics Question

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Parietal Lobe

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Say you have a series circuit with five resistors and three bulbs marked A, B, and C. If you want to find the voltage drop between bulb B and C and all you're given is the resistance between the two, is the voltage drop going to be the same as the resistance assuming you're not given current?

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Say you have a series circuit with five resistors and three bulbs marked A, B, and C. If you want to find the voltage drop between bulb B and C and all you're given is the resistance between the two, is the voltage drop going to be the same as the resistance assuming you're not given current?

I'm not entirely sure what you're asking, but I'll just explain the whole thing and you can get whatever information you need out of it.

The first thing you do in a situation like this is you need to realize that a light bulb is a resistor, nothing more. Any load on a circuit can be treated like a resistor, and in the case of a light bulb, it is purely a resistor anyway (a light bulb works because the current passes through an extremely high resistance filament, so there's a lot of friction in the filament and so that creates a lot of heat which is emitted as visible blackbody radiation from the light bulb filament).

So in reality, you have 8 resistors in the circuit, all in series. So the total resistance of the circuit is the sum of the resistances of each resistor or bulb. Thus, the voltage drop across any resistor or bulb in the circuit is simply:

Vbulb=Vtotal(Rbulb/Rtotal)

So if you know the applied voltage on the circuit, you can determine the voltage drop across any bulb or resistor. Similarly, if you know the current, I, through the circuit you can very easily determine the voltage drop across a bulb or resistor by

Vbulb=I*Rbulb

So the point is, and I think this may answer your question, you need to know either the current and the resistance of the bulb or resistor in question, or else all of the resistances and the applied voltage, if you want to determine the voltage drop across a particular resistor or bulb.

I'm not sure what you mean by "the voltage drop between bulb B and C" though. If there are no resistors or bulbs between bulbs B and C, and assuming that the connecting wire has negligible resistance, the voltage drop between the two bulbs would be 0. If voltage were measured so that the two points of measurement included the two bulbs, then you would determine voltage as the sum of the voltage drops across B and across C, as mentioned above. In that case, it would depend on either the total applied voltage and the other resistors, or else on the current.

Hope that helps, lemme know if you have any questions
 
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