Question
(a) What do you understand by degree of freedom? Give an example.
(b) On what factors does the degree of freedom of gas depend?
Solution
(a) The number of independent coordinates required to specify the position of particle or system of particles is known as degree of freedom.
For e.g. if a particle moves on the surface of table, it has two degrees of freedom. This is because in order to locate the position of particle two independent coordinates are required.
(b) Degree of freedom depends upon the following factors:
(i) Temperature of gas.
(ii) Atomicity of gas
i.e. whether gas is monoatomic, diatomic, triatomic or polyatomic.
