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I drive a Nissan Leaf to work. With the e-pedal on, the motor recovers energy through braking very aggressively. I need about 7 KW-hour to come to school if I use mostly the freeways. That’s about 5 KW-hour if I take mostly local streets. From the energy perspective, can you offer an explanation to explain this difference?

Over the course of a day, 4.0 kg of water evaporates from the leaves of a corn plant. a) How much energy is required to evaporate the water? (Assume that the temperature of the leaves is 30C.) b) If the plant is active for 12 hours, how much power does this correspond to? You can think of this as the necessary power to drive transport in the plant.

Many thermodynamic processes occur naturally in one specific direction but not in the opposite direction. For instance, cooling a closed environment on a very hot day requires electrical energy to be carried out, as in the case of an air conditioner. Why is that? Another example: it's easy to fully convert mechanical energy into heat, which happens every time we use the brakes to stop a car. However, in the opposite direction, there are many devices that only partially convert heat into mechanical energy, like the engine of a car. But even the most talented inventor has yet to build a machine capable of fully converting an amount of heat into mechanical energy. Once again, why? The answer to these two questions is related to the directions of thermodynamic processes and is provided by the second law of thermodynamics.   With regard to various concepts related to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, analyze the following statements: Thermal machines are devices used to convert mechanical…