Question: Electric field lines provide information about: A. field strength B. direction C. nature of ch...

Question

Electric field lines provide information about:
A. field strength
B. direction
C. nature of charge
D. all of these

Answer 1

Solution

Recall the basics of electric field and electric field lines. The electric field lines are primarily associated with the electric field which arises from an electric charge and gives information about various factors related with the electric field. Check the factors associated with both the electric field lines and electric field.

Complete answer:
The electric field lines are the curves which gives the information about the electric field.
The electric field around an electric charge is given by
$\vec E = \dfrac{1}{{4\pi {\varepsilon _0}}}\dfrac{q}{{{r^3}}}\hat r$
Here, $\dfrac{1}{{4\pi {\varepsilon _0}}}$ is the constant, $q$ is the charge, $r$ is the distance of the point charge from the source charge and $\hat r$ is the unit vector showing the direction of the electric field.From the above equation, we can see that the electric field lines give the information about the electric field from which we can determine the nature of charge (from $q$ ) and direction of electric field (from $\hat r$ ).

The terms in the above equation are also called electric field intensity. Hence, the terms provide the information about the strength of the electric field.Also, the electric field lines always originate from positive charge and end up at negative charge. From this, we can determine the direction of field and nature of the charge.The electric field with high intensity has dense electric field lines.Thus, the electric field lines provide information about field strength, direction of electric field and nature of the electric charge.

Hence, the correct option is D.

Note: The students should always remember that the formula for electric field in scalar form given in the solution (which is in the vector form to show that electric field lines gives the direction of electric field) is slightly different with the term ${r^2}$ at the denominator and absent unit vector term $\hat r$ giving direction of electric field.