In some sense you need to go back in time, to when you took your PHYS 2305 final exam. Take the part of your mind that has any of that and add that to the part of your mind that did the MATH 2214 final exam. So my advice is practice taking the PHYS 2305 final exams and the MATH 2214 final exams. Bring it all back in focus. Clearly not all of the material in MATH 2214 is needed, but most of PHYS 2305 is needed. Some old final exams are on the web:
We've found two conceptual errors *.
We find two things wrong with this statement. 1. You can't apply Newton's third law between a particle and a magnetic field, because a magnetic field is not a particle, so there is no corresponding particle (or anything) to apply the reaction force to, and so this statement is nonsense to begin with. 2. The magnetic force between two moving charged particles in general do not obey weak or strong versions of Newton's 3rd law. See Goldstein pages 7,8.
One must keep in mind that magnetic forces violating the weak and strong versions of Newton's 3rd law is not surprising given that magnetic force itself is a relativistic effect. So in many cases Newton's 2nd law is violated when magnetic forces are involved. The inconsistency between Newton's laws of motion and forces between moving charged particles lead to the theory of Special Relativity (relativistic mechanics).
by L. E. Elsgolc, Oxford, New York, Pergamon Press 1961. A nice old short book that is at just the right level for supplementing this mechanics course. There's a few copies at the VT Library. Call Number QA315.E513
by Fowles & Cassiday (7th ed, ISBN 0534494927): this book was used the last time this course was taught at Virginia Tech. Many people consider this book easier to read than Marion & Thornton. This book does not introduce Lagrangian mechanics until the 2nd to the last chapter of the book. There is a copy in the SPS Meeting Room, Room 222, Robeson Hall. There's also a copy of the 6th edition on reserve at Newman library.
Your instructor and many others consider Lagrangian mechanics to be the most important topic in the course, and so introducing it early in the course will give a student more exposure to it. Lagrangian mechanics is used throughout the rest of the course (and course text) after it's introduced.
Like most texts there is some conceptually erroneous material in this text too. I'm not keeping tabs here, but here's an example: On page 121 in the paragraph after (3.6.17) it talks about energy in a driven damped oscillator. The problem with that is that the chapter never defined what this energy is. Energy in the oscillator needs to be clearly defined, to make such statements. If this author is following what I have found to be standard, then the energy would be the kinetic plus potential (of the undriven and undamped oscillator) and that is oscillating at steady state, and is not equal to a constant times the Coefficient of the sinusoidal steady state solution function squared. Calculating a time average is required. Energy is not constant at steady state.
gnuplot links