Section Check In –
Core Pure: Vectors and 3-D space
Questions
1.* Find a vector which is perpendicular to the vectors and .
2.* Find the Cartesian equation of the line passing through the points and .
3.* Find the equation of the plane through the points , and .
4.* Find the point of intersection between the plane and the line
5.* The line L1 passes through the points and . The line L2 passes through
the point and is parallel to the vector .
(i) Find an equation for L1 in the form .
(ii) Prove that L1 and L2 are skew.
6.* Two lines have equations
and ,
where is a constant.
Given that the two lines intersect,
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(i) find and the point of intersection,
(ii) find the acute angle between the lines.
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7. Determine whether the following vectors form a set of three perpendicular vectors:
8. A plane is given by the equation .
Determine an equation for the plane in each of the following forms:
(i)
(ii) .
9.* It is given that where
Find possible values of the constants and
10.* Three points have coordinates .
Find the perpendicular distance from C to the line AB.
Extension
Let a and b be the position vectors of two points A and B (respectively) relative to an origin O.
(i) Explain why and represent the equations of two
spheres. Give the full details for each sphere and show that the point with position vector
lies on both of them.
(ii) The spheres intersect in a circle. Find the position vector, , of the centre of this circle, giving
your answer in the form .
[UODLE 9851/0 1987 Q4, adapted]
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Worked solutions
1. Using the vector product, a vector perpendicular to the two given vectors is
2. The vector equation of a line is written in the form
Choose .
To find we have to find the direction vector between the 2 points; .
Hence the vector equation of the line is where is a real parameter.
The cartesian equation is found by saying that and rearranging each component of the
vector equation for : . (Other equivalent forms are possible!)
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3. We first find and
The cross product is then taken to find the normal to the plane:
The equation of the plane is which in this case is .
To find we use one of the points, say ,
so that the vector equation is
and hence the cartesian equation of the plane is .
4. First we write expressions for and using the equation of the line:
Next we substitute these expressions into the equation of the plane:
Solving for :
Substituting this back into the equation of the line gives
hence the point of intersection is .
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5. (i) We need the direction vector and a point on the line. To find the direction vector we have
to find the difference between the position vectors of two points on the line, therefore:
A position vector on the line is so an equation of the line is:
, where is scalar parameter than can take any value.
(ii) First I’ll find the equation of the line . The direction of the line is parallel to so
the direction vector of the line is:
A position vector on the line is . Therefore an equation of the line is:
The lines are not parallel as their directions are not parallel so either they intersect or they are skew.
If the 2 lines intersect then the position vectors of points on the lines will be equal for
some values of the parameters, so:
I can form 3 equations, but only two are needed to find values for s and t, for example
and .
Solving these simultaneously gives and .
Now, the lines only intersect if these values also work for the third equation;
LHS
RHS
These are not equal so the lines are skew.
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6. (i) The lines are not parallel as the directions of each line are not scalar multiples of each
other. They must either intersect or are skew. Therefore:
Forming 3 equations:
Re-arranging:
We choose any 2 of the equations, solve for s and t and then substitute into the one we
haven’t used to see if it’s consistent. If we get ‘nonsense’ the lines are skew. We’ll use the
2 equations not involving :
Multiplying equation two by 4 to make one of the unknowns equal in size:
Subtracting: ,
Therefore:
Substituting into the equation involving :
If the lines intersect then this equation must make sense. Therefore . The point of
intersection can then be found by substituting or into one of the equations, I’ll choose
the equation not involving :
So the point of intersection is and the value must take is 1.
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(ii) To find the angle between 2 lines, we have to find the angle between the direction
vectors of each line and use the formula: .
The magnitudes are:
The scalar product is:
Therefore: , to 1 dp
7.
Hence they are all perpendicular (note that it is not enough to show that , though it
would be if you also showed that .)
8. We need to choose any point on the line, for example .
We will also need the normal to the plane .
Then:
(i)
(ii)
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9. where k is a scalar.
One possibility is with .
10. so line AB is parallel to .
A general point, P, on the line AB has position vector
When CP is perpendicular to AB,
In this case,
Distance =
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Extension
(i) describes the locus of a general point R, with position vector , which is
such that the square of its distance from the fixed point A, with position vector , is a fixed
positive value . This locus is the sphere with centre A and radius .
Similarly, gives the sphere centre B and radius .
If we set in the two equations we get, respectively, and so
that both equations are satisfied, and hence the point with position vector is on both
spheres.
(ii)
Note that OABR is a parallelogram.
Now C lies on AB and hence for some with .
Since CR is perpendicular to AB, we have
i.e. or
and we have and .
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