This charge would experience a force to the left, pushing it down towards the end. A clever way to calculate the electric field from a charged conductor is to use Gauss' Law, which is explained in Appendix D in the textbook. Gauss' Law can be tricky to apply, though, so we won't get into that. What we will do is to look at some implications of Gauss' Law. It's also a good time to introduce the concept of flux.
Electric flux is a measure of the number of electric field lines passing through an area.
To calculate the flux through a particular surface, multiply the surface area by the component of the electric field perpendicular to the surface. If the electric field is parallel to the surface, no field lines pass through the surface and the flux will be zero. The maximum flux occurs when the field is perpendicular to the surface. Gauss' Law - the sum of the electric flux through a surface is equal to the charge enclosed by a surface divided by a constant , the permittivity of free space. It's a constant related to the constant k that appears in Coulomb's law.