Pedantic Notations and Exam Questions

[Sans Sanity]

I was going through a past paper where you are meant to calculate the rate of work which gravity is going on an object. Due to the information provided in the question, my results ended up being 1.1x10^8 J/hour to 2 sig.figs. The answer ended up being 2.9x10^5 Watts. I continued my answer to get the latter, which was the correct answer. If I was to use that first answer as an answer in the exam, would I be marked incorrect due to the incorrect notation, or would I be marked correct due to the answer being correct in its own notation?

[joe]

Rate of work done by gravity ...

1.1x10^8 J/hour

Yours certainly is an unexpected unit. It's a bit misleading here, too because, if ever an object fell for one hour, then the gravitational field would not be constant.

You might lose one mark for giving strange units, but not more: it would depend on the wording of the question and perhaps the generosity of the marking scheme and marker.

In general, while it is possible to write speed as furlongs/hour and surface tensions as gigaslugs per square fortnight, I'd suggest sticking to SI units

Joe