Question
A microscope with an overall magnification of 800 has an objective that magnifies by 200. (a) What is the magnification of the eyepiece? (b) If there are two other objectives that can be used, having magnifications of 100 and 400, what other total magnifications are possible?
Question by OpenStax is licensed under CC BY 4.0
Final Answer
  1. 4.004.00
  2. m1=400m_1 = 400
    m2=1.60×103m_2 = 1.60\times 10^{3}

Solution video

OpenStax College Physics, Chapter 26, Problem 26 (Problems & Exercises)

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Video Transcript
This is College Physics Answers with Shaun Dychko. A microscope has an overall magnification of 800 and the objective has a magnification of 200 and so the question is what is the magnification caused by the eyepiece lens? The overall magnification is the product and by that I mean the result of multiplying the objective magnification and the eyepiece magnification. So we can divide both sides by m o— objective magnification— to solve for the eyepiece magnification it's going to be 800 divided by 200 which is 4.00. In part (b), we are asked if there were two other objectives that could be used having the magnifications of 100 and 400 what other total magnifications are possible? So in the first case with a 100 magnification objective, we would multiply that by the 4.00 times the objective of the eyepiece to get a total magnification of 400 or in the second case with a 400 times objective multiplying that by the 4.00 times magnification of the eyepiece gives 1.60 times 10 to the 3 magnification.