The objective of this laboratory is to introduce the basic laboratory instruments and equipment that will be used for the rest of the semester. An equipment list detailing the equipment needed at each work station is enclosed. The list is useful in planning your experimental procedure. Resistor color code is also introduced. The opposition of a material to flow of current is its resistance which is measured in Ohms.
Conductors are a group of materials that offer low resistance to flow of current.
Insulators on the other hand are group of materials that offer extremely high resistance. Resistor manufacturers have adopted a color code scheme for indicating resistance of a given resistor. The numerical value of each color is given in Table I. Figure 1 shows how the color codes can be used to find nominal resistance of a resistor. If the third band is gold or silver, this would indicate a multiplier of 0.1 or 0.01 respectively. The fourth band indicates the tolerance of the resistor's value from the indicated value.