NCERT Class XII Chapter
Electric Charges and Fields
Questions With Solutions

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Question : 4
Total: 34
(a) Explain the meaning of the statement ‘electric charge of a body is quantised’.
(b) Why can one ignore quantisation of electric charge when dealing with macroscopic i.e., large scale charges?
Solution:  
(a) The net charge possessed by a body is an integral multiple of charge of an electron i.e. q = ± ne, where n = 0, 1, 2, 3, ... is the number of electrons lost or gained by the body and e = 1.6 × 1019 C is charge of an electron. This is called law of quantization of charge.
(b) At macroscopic level, charges are enormously large as compared to the charge of an electron, e = 1.6 × 1019 C. Even a charge of 1 nC contains nearly 1013 electronic charges. So, at this large scale, charge can have a continuous value rather than discrete integral multiple of e, and hence, the quantization of electric charge can be ignored.
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