Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

Hello!
I'm doing my project on this: https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... alorimeter

And I've finished. All I have to do now is make a graph but I'm really confused on how exactly I'm supposed to do it. My teacher and the lab technicians in our school told us that we MUST make a graph for our analysis and that it HAS to be a line graph too since one variable is changed by one variable is changed by another one... But, if my independent variable (x-axis) are the food items and my dependent variable (y-axis) is the caloric content of the food, how am I supposed to make a line graph for that? And they said to NOT forget the units on both axes of the graph too. If the unit for the y-axis is Cal, there shouldn't be a unit for the x axis right?

Any suggestions for building a line graph on this topic?

Hi,

I checked the Make it Your Own part of your project (https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... eityourown) because sometimes this has ideas that you can use to make your project more interesting. The problem here is a common one--the bomb calorimeter that you made and used is to demonstrate how it works not to do an experiment. What you did was burn food items and measure the increase in temperature of water as a result to allow you to calculate the caloric content of the food. So, you are correct. The only way you could show this is as a bar chart with the cal values on the y-axis and the foods labeled on the x-axis. There is no data there to make a line graph.

In reading the Make it Your Own section, however, i had an idea. You can get the carbohydrate and fat content information from each food's nutrition label so maybe you could plot that on the x-axis with the cal content that you measured on the y-axis. Your hypothesis could be--Foods with higher fat content have more calories. I don't know if you can make this work into a graph, but it's worth a try. Otherwise just explain to your teacher that what you did was a demonstration of a calorimeter and thus did not produce data that could be turned into a line graph.

If you have questions, we can try to help.

Good luck!

Sybee

That is great help. Thank you for the ideas!