Water Olympics Lab Write Up
In station one, we explored the idea of density. Density is the amount of cmpactness in an object. We used oil and water, and observed the density of each substance. when pouring the two back and forth, the oil moves slower and the water moves faster and more choppy then the vegetable oil. Seeing this, oil was presumed to be more dense, so I made a hypothesis that if testing the density of oil and water, oil is more dense than its counterpart of water. After a trial of both, it turns out that water has a density of 0.96 g/ml and oil is 0.88 g/ml. Therefore, the given hypothesis stated previously was proven incorrect, showing that density cannot be predicted by looking at something, When looking at a mixed
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When the water gets to the brink of the cup where it should overflow, surface tension retains the liquid in the cup, this concept is shown at station three. When at station three, to test the surface tension of oil and water, we placed paper clips on the top of the cups of both liquids. The paper clips in the oil sank to the bottom and didn’t create a dome of oil, showing oil has low surface tension. Water did create a dome on the surface and let the paperclips float. The “film” that the water makes allow the clips to rest on the top of the water. Surface tension is important to living things because in marine ecosystems, there might be some bacteria or particles that are on the surface of the water, that if they got into the water, they could hurt animals or break ecosystems. If an oilspill were to occur, those potentially harmful particles and substances will go into the wate, because the oil will disrupt the surface tension, causing the animals to be sick.
At station five, the mixing of water and oil or detergent was tested. When adding the oil, the oil just sits on top of the water, and when you mix the two, the oil divides into smaller bubbles of it above the water. This shows that water cannot dissolve lipids, although it is coined as a “universal solvent”. When adding detergent to water, it sinks to the bottom of the beaker. When mixing them together, the detergent dissolves in the water. This shows once again, that water dissolves most substances, except