A group of students designed three separate experiments to investigate different physical and chemical processes. In each design, a specific uncontrolled variable or a systematic source of error was introduced.
* Experiment 1: To study how the concentration of reactant affects the rate of a chemical reaction, students combined reactant with reactant in three separate test tubes. They used , , and solutions of reactant . However, they used test tubes of different diameters (, , and ) for each concentration, measuring the time it took for the mixture to change color.
* Experiment 2: To study the effect of temperature on the rate of gas diffusion, students placed a gas canister at , , and at one end of a closed horizontal tube and measured the time required for the gas to travel to the other end. Because the trials were performed on different days, the relative humidity in the room fluctuated between and during testing.
* Experiment 3: To compare the density of three different liquid samples (, , and ), students used a graduated cylinder to measure of each liquid and recorded their masses using a digital balance. However, the balance was not zeroed (tared) before measuring Liquid , so the balance registered an initial reading of before any mass was added.
Match each experiment with its primary source of error or confounding variable.
- Experiment 1 (Reactant Concentration)Varying test tube diameters, which alters the surface area of the liquid-gas interface and geometry of the reaction volume.
- Experiment 2 (Gas Diffusion)Fluctuating ambient relative humidity, which alters the density of the surrounding air and impacts molecular collision rates.
- Experiment 3 (Liquid Density)A systematic calibration offset in the scale, which introduces a constant measurement bias to one of the samples.