Video Transcript
The diagram shows an electric
circuit containing a cell and a bulb. What is the direction of the
conventional current in the circuit?
Here, we’ve been asked to find the
direction of the conventional current in the circuit shown in the diagram. To begin, we should recall that
conventional current assumes that charge carriers are positive. And because of this, conventional
current always points away from the positive terminal. So now we just have to look at the
cell in the diagram, identify which terminal is positive, and we’ll know that the
conventional current points away from that one.
Recall that when we draw the symbol
for a cell in an electric circuit, we always make the line representing the positive
terminal longer than the line representing the negative terminal. Let’s label the diagram to help
show this. Notice that the positive terminal,
represented by the longer line, is at the bottom of the cell. So in this circuit, the
conventional current will point away from the positive terminal downward, around,
up, through the bulb and back around toward the negative terminal.
Now it’s clear to see that in this
circuit, the direction of conventional current is counterclockwise. This is our final answer.
