Lab Report Anaerobic Respiration

[opheliasque]

I am absolutely horrid at writing up Lab Reports - I'm not sure whether it's because I'm stupid and just can't work out the logical steps, or not spending enough time on them.

Our teacher set us a Design IA where about testing the alcoholic content in wine.

"M observed that when the fruit, yeast and sugar mixture was kept in a warm place, many bubbles were produced, and the number of these bubbles increased with time. M understood that during this time the wine was becoming alcoholic, so he decided to add more sugar to increase the alcoholic strength of the drink further. However, he was rather disappointed to discover that assign more sugar did not produce more bubbles or alcohol, it simply made the wine taste sweeter. Use the information provided to investigate the problem further."

We were given this in dotpoint:

• Yeast is able to respire anaerobically, producing carbon dioxide and alcohol (ethanol)

• Yeast reproduces asexually, by binary fission

Could a research question be as short as, "What conditions are optimum for maximising alcohol content?"

Though I have a feeling that is incredibly vague, and the wording is off, or perhaps even missing the entire point. Are we to investigate the effects of sugar or lack thereof?

Tips would be greatly appreciated.

[Guest Soiboist]

Generally, in your research question you should always include the independent variable and the dependent variable. For instance, if you are investigating whether coffee speeds up the process of metabolism that is exactly what should be included in your aim. "The aim of this experiement was to find out if coffee speeds up metabolism through..." After "through" you could insert some further details about the experiment, but I would try to keep this as brief as possible.

In your example here the amount of sugar, as an independent variable, has already been found not to increase alcoholic content. Thus, as there are only two other possible substances, one of either fruit or yeast has to increase alcohol content (if the amount of one of them matters, that is). I think you can figure out which of them does, but that doesn't really matter right now. Your research question would be either "Does the amount of fruit increase the alcoholic content in wine?" or "Does the amount of yeast increase the alcholic content in wine?" or similar. The further information that you were given is for using in the hypothesis and then the conclusion. In your hypothesis you have to state why you would believe that the amount of yeast (which is the obvious variable affecting alcohol) would increase the alcohol, and you could possibly use this information for that purpose.

[opheliasque]

Thank you very much!