Question

The electric potential a distance r from a small charge is proportional to what power of the distance from the charge?

Answer 1

Answer:

The power of the distance is -1.

Explanation:

The equation for the electric potential of a point charge is given by $V= k\frac{q}{r}$

where V is the electric potential, k is Coulomb's constant (it has a value of $9.0*10^{9}$ with units $\frac{Nm^{2} }{c^{2} }$), q is the electric charge of the small charge and r is the distance from the charge.

Now, the power of a number is how many times we multiply that number by itself; we see r appears only once in the equation. So we know the power is 1. But we can see in the equation that k and q are divided by r, which means r is the denominator. This means the power of r is negative (-).

Therefore, the power of r is -1.