Results For The Sucrose Concentrations example essay topic

The results of this lab where quite what one would expect. The lower the mol age of the sucrose concentration, the more the potato grew in mass. For an extreme example take the final results of the distilled water and the 1 M of sucrose solution. The % in weight change for the 1 M of sucrose concentration was -12.5 which was over all the highest change, and the least mass left in the potato cores.

The opposite was true for the potato cores in the distilled water. In the end they grew by 5.7%, the highest positive weight change. The results for the sucrose concentrations in between fall nicely into place and clearly show that as the sucrose concentration was higher the hypertonic the potato cells became, where as when the concentration was lower the potato cells became more hypotonic. A graph of the total percent weight change against sucrose concentration shows that at. 28 M sucrose concentration would be isotonic to the potato cells, meaning that with that concentration osmosis would not take place because they would both have the same concentration.

Although these results seem firm, there are many errors that could have taken place. For one, there is always the problem of human error which works its way into everything. The first error that could have taken place was that all the potato cores could not have been properly "patted" dry, or that they were each differently "patted" before the weighing. This could prove fatal to the results because it would mean that some of the cores were more dry than the others, creating odd bumps in the results, and ultimately twisting the results therefore making them useless. Another tremendous place error could have occurred would be the procedure of extracting the cores from and into the cups of solution, and the timing of when they were taking out. This could happen easily and instead of taking them all out after 10 minutes, one would be out at 10.5 minutes, while the other went out at 11, this is unavoidable because one does not have enough hands to take all the cores out at the same time.

This means that some cores stayed in their relative concentrations of sucrose for longer or shorter amounts, thus again skewing our results. Also, the equipment we used might have caused more problems in our results. As our equipment isn't the best, and most accurate in the world, it may have distorted our results and therefore our graphs. Another big mistake one could make is with the graphing of the best fit line. This is more of a thing were one basically guesses where the line should be. This directly relates to the point that shows where the sucrose concentration is isotonic to the potato cells.

There are a couple solutions to some of these problems. For "patting" or drying of the cores, one could simply just leave them the way they are, therefore we avoid the problem of over drying one potato compared to another. The way to solve the issue of removing them all at the same time, one could ask someone around their vicinity to help them remove the cores with you. This would mean that the time between the cores and when they got out of their solutions is yet slimmer, although not entirely gone.

As for the equipment, there is not much one can do because that is the only equipment the school has, and that is what needs to be worked with. Finally addressing the problem of the best fit curve, there is no real solution except to take a lot of time and try and work out where one feels it should go.