how does eletric work – Plutonium Zone

Question: how does eletric work
- Keywords:
  electric
Asked by KUNG FU TIGER to Jake, James, Pete, Senga, Simonne on 9 Nov 2017.
- Senga Robertson answered on 9 Nov 2017:
  
  Hi Tapo bulu
  
  the one sentence explanation is that electricity is a form of energy that can flow from one place to another (electric current) or build up in one place (static electricity).
  
  Electricity is caused by electrons, electrons orbit/ travel around the edges of atoms and atoms make up everything on earth…including us. Electrons have something called a negative charge but luckily there are also things in atoms called protons that have a positive charge so it means that overall an atom isn’t normally positively or negatively charged. Since atoms join together to make molecules and molecules make up everything on earth it means that normal things like our hair and clothes aren’t positively or negatively charged.
  
  Static electricity : have you ever ran across a carpet and then touched something metal, like a door handle and got a shock? I can explain this…as you run across the carpet your feet are rubbing against it, this builds up energy in your body, you might even start to feel a weird tingly feeling, this is the electricity building up in your body (don’t worry, it’s not dangerous) so when you touch something metal the electricity will instantly jump to the metal handle…which is when you might feel a shock…sometimes if you touch another person instead of something metal it can actually give them a shock too!
  
  Electrical current is a bit different, that’s the electricity which powers your home and….well pretty much everything electrical. Electrical current is when electrons move from one place to another around a circuit. A good example is if you think of a battery, a battery has 2 ends a negative and a positive end but until you put it into a toy it doesn’t give out electricity. when you put it in a toy the toy has wires inside that conduct electricity in a circuit so when you put the battery in it completes the circuit. The electrons then flow out of the negative end of the battery, around the circuit to the positive end of the battery.
  
  gosh, that was a long answer. I hope it made sense!
  
  Senga 🙂
- Jake Langham answered on 10 Nov 2017:
  
  Hi tapo bulu, I just want to add a few things to Senga’s nice explanation. Like Senga says, electricity is all about electrons moving around in conducting materials like bits of metal wire. (This is how energy is transferred in an electrical device like a toaster or mobile phone.) The rule that determines how they move is that charges that are the same repel each other and charges that are different attract each other. When you put a battery in a mobile phone, it is negatively charged at one end and positively charged at the other. And the ends are connected by a wire, making a loop (circuit). The battery REPELS electrons at one end and ATTRACTS them at the other end making them all move round the circuit in the same direction – from negative to positive.
  
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  I hope that helps, if it doesn’t please ask more questions. Electricity is tricky topic so we probably can’t explain everything in one quick answer. 🙂

Question: how does eletric work

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