1) The moment of inertia one...do you want to area under the curve or the area contained within the curve?
Determine the moment of inertia about the y-axis. This is different from just the area. Please check in your book and the lecture slides about this, or come to office hours
2)I am a little unclear about the motor question.
Consider that the bar is laying down on the y-axis (ie aligned with it) in position. The motor has a maximum moment for each direction, so I'm just asking for a single direction of force - vertical given the torque the motor can generate about a particular axis, and the length of the bar which you can compute from information given. Go to the chapter or slides regarding moments (ch4 most likely on force system resultants) for more information.
3)I got partial credit for a problem. Am I completely wrong?
If you got partial credit then your answer is within about 20% but not within 1% of the correct answer. Check your calculations, do the actual punching in of number at the end, make sure there's no minor errors or sign problems.
4) if I get a negative answer for any of the solutions should I leave it as negative or submit it as positive?
Since you can't change arrow directions, you should put the negative.
5) For question 1, which area are you referring to defined by the curve, above the curve or under? dA will be different in each case.
Above the curve would be infinity, unless a boundary line was given, which it wasn't. So we're interested in the area under the curve between the curve and the x-axis.
6) For the "what is associated unit vector's i element. What exactly is it asking for? X-axis, 1.5m in the x direction, the place of x?
It's asking for the number associated with the i direction. Blackboard doesn't have an easy way to ask for a whole vector. I tried a lot of variations in problem structure.
7) For the unit vector magnitude question, what would that be?
You'll have to think about this question. Look up unit vectors. What is the magnitude of a unit vector? It's not a trick question, compute a unit vector for some random vector, then once you have it, try computing the magnitude - what is it? Why is that?
8) I just took my first attempt on the final and got a lot of partially right answers. Are we being graded on significant figures? If so, do you always want 3? I put less sig figs on some questions that gave the questions in numbers with less than 3.
You are being graded on significant figures. And you are graded as getting a problem correct if the answer is within 1% of the correct answer. So if the answer is 2.0, and you calculate 2.343, you will miss points if you write in 2.343, because that is outside of 1%. There is partial credit, but that is if you are within 20%.
9) What do you mean oriented along the y axis? Should I alter the illustration so the green bar doesn't travel away from the y axis? Could you please word the question more clearly for me?
"When the bar is oriented along the y axis." If you make a drawing, what does something that is in line with the y axis look like? For that problem yes you may need to create a new version of the drawing. The same system is used for both problems, but the orientation of the bar is different. You need the a,b,c lengths to get the length of the bar. Part the learnings to take away from this class is a better understanding of word problems - the information is in these problems, you have to draw it out into a clear concise expression. No I'm not going to answer the question for you, that's up to you guys:)