Help with Hypothesis: Which Sedimentary Rock stores oil the best

[BugZapper2050]

Hello from Bug Zapper 2050 and his mother,

We need help with the hypothesis for a variation he did on Rocky Secrets, Where Does Oil Hide, a study of how rocks absorb oil. He has done the research and written it and done the experiments. However, I am afraid our hypothesis might be wrong or our independent variables. We used three sets of rocks (shale, limestone, sandstone), following procedure, putting three drops of oil on each one. He figured limestone would absorb oil the fastest due to porosity. He wrote about it in his research paper but he did not get into percentages of porosity in each rock because its too advanced a concept for him and its something I don't think we could say for sure unless we had access to a real lab! However, he needed a testable hypothesis. His question was "which sedimentary rock absorbs oil the best? and his hypothesis was "the more porous the surface of a sedimentary rock, the faster it will absorb oil" (changed recently to "if oil is dropped on limestone, sandstone and shale, then limestone would absorb it the fastest because it has the most porous surface:). Porosity judged by appearance only=what we could see. He listed the independent variable as the type of rock used, but now we are thinking it should be porous surface of the rock? Or are we going down a wrong road with our hypothesis? Any help you can offer would be great:))

Amy

[MadelineB]

Hello Bug Zapper 2050 and his mother,
Welcome to Science Buddies!
The project sounds like fun and you are asking good questions about hypotheses and independent and dependent variables.

There is a section in this project guide called "Constructing a Hypothesis":

https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... ience-fair

If you haven't already, look at that section and see if that helps. Please let us know if you have more questions and good luck with the research paper.

Madeline