Prediction –
I predict that the distilled water will make the potato chip become very stiff, and as the concentration of the sucrose solution increases the turgidity of the potato chip will decrease.
Sucrose is made up of part water and part sugar, Water will make the potato chip turgid and the sugar will make the chip less turgid so the solution is built half and half.
Hypothesis
I predict that Deionised Water will make the potato chip become very turgid,
And that the Higher the concentration of sucrose the less turgid the potato chip will become.
Fair Test –
I will make the experiment a fair test keeping the amounts of the solutions + the water all the same which happens to be 40 ml and I have made sure of it by using a measuring cylinder, also I have kept the length of the chip to the same size which is 8 cm long.
Method –
There are 2 parts to the method, which are:
The Mass of the potato chip before and after and,
The turgidity of the potato chip before and after.
Here is the overall method for the whole experiment:
- First we had to prepare all of the equipment listed in the apparatus,
- We had to measure out 40ml of Sucrose + Water pouring it from a plastic bottle into 5 test tubes,
- I had to get a weight scale and put each 5 potato chips onto the scale individually to get an accurate result for each chip.
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Then we had to set up the turgidity measurer which was set up in the diagram to the right, it is made of a plastic cylinder with water inside and a cork in the top and 2 pins at the top, these pins were meant for the potato chips to be placed to the biggest and the smaller pin was used to punch into the chip and into the cork holding it in place so we could use a ruler to measure how far the chip was from the desk,
- Then we had to get a stopwatch and dip all the 5 potato chips into the test tubes and start the timer for 40 minutes,
- During the 40 minutes I had prepared 5 sheets of filter paper with the different concentrations written on the paper to tell which is which so that when the time is due I would put the chips on the paper and conduct my experiment for mass after and the turgidity after.
Safety -
There are certain precautions you must take in conducting this experiment, you may not think that handling potato’s is all that dangerous but I have listed the dangers that could be prevented:
You should use a chopping tile when chopping up the potato to size, this could inflict damage to the table yet it can rebound and hit someone else and could severely injure them.
Safety must be taken when using the potato borer because at the end is a very sharp end used for cutting into the potato, improper use would lead to people having it penetrate the skin and do very much damage.
The most important safety rule in the Science laboratory is that you take care in using the knife as it has a very sharp end and wont use that much force to do damage to anyone around you.
Table of Results
Charts for showing the trend of the results shall be shown at the end.
Conclusion –
I think that my prediction had proved to be correct in that the potato chip that was dipped in the deionised water turned out to be the most turgid out of all the solutions in total. I was also right in saying that as the concentration of Sucrose increases the turgidity will decrease, the opposite will happen if the concentration of Sucrose had gone down then the turgidity would have increased.
Evaluation of Method –
My method overall I think was relatively detailed and needed no improvement as such but, when we conducted the experiment for the first time as a practise, we needed to be faster and more accurate in collecting results.
That for me was a target that I would have to improve on in the real experiment.
Evaluation of Results –
The results clearly state that Water is a definite source of making plants become very turgid, and it also shows that Sucrose would make the plants droop and eventually die.
I repeated the experiment twice simply because the results were no good if there were weren’t another set of results to back them up, I took my practise results into consideration and they turned out to be of the same outcome.
If I had more time I believe I could have conducted more experiments further improving my results, as it would clearly state a trend in the results