Question

What can you conclude about gamma rays compared to radio waves?

Gamma rays have a lower frequency than radio waves.

Gamma rays have a higher frequency than radio waves.

Gamma rays have the same wavelength as radio waves.

Gamma rays have a greater wavelength than radio waves.

Answer 1

Consider that radiowaves are all around us. If you don't believe me, take a radio and turn it on, if you start hearing music then you know they're bouncing around everywhere. Since they're all over the place, we know that must mean they're harmless to people.

So why aren't radiowaves harmful? Well that's because they have a long wavelength, which isn't able to affect your atoms which are tiny. Think of all the things you use that have an antenna attached, those antenna are made to a size about half the wavelength of the radiation it's absorbing.

So when the radio waves hit it, they start exciting the electrons in the antenna. Now lets consider all the atoms you're made up of. If you have a small enough wavelength about the size of an atom, you'd start breaking your body apart in a similar kind of fashion and messing up your structure on the ATOMIC LEVEL! =O What's tiny enough to do that? You might have guessed it, gamma and x-radiation! These have a very tiny wavelength, and now you can see the physical significance of wavelength.

Now if you're into math you might like to know a little extra, that all electromagnetic waves, meaning light, radio, x-ray, gamma, etc... all move at the speed of light, which is constant. Wavelength times frequency is equal to the speed of light then, since wavelength is in meters, frequency is in 1/s, and speed is m/s. So for example if you increase the wavelength, the frequency drops or if you increase the frequency, the wavelength drops in order for it to be constant.

By this we know that smaller wavelengths have higher frequencies and vice versa. Higher frequency means higher energy and I can go more in depth if you're interested to learn more, so recap...

Short wavelength = high frequency = high energy
long wavelength = low frequency = low energy