investigative question????

[sciencebaby]

My topic is "Which fruit contain the most Vitamin C to neutralize Chlorine in the Tap water?" or should that be the investigative question?

Can someone show me some example of the investigative question?

[deleted-2574]

Hi sciencebaby,

The project question is documented in https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... tion.shtml , which has examples of project questions.

I don't know the language "investigative" question and couldn't find it on the Science Buddies site.

Maybe someone more familiar with the lingo can help.

[Louise]

My topic is "Which fruit contain the most Vitamin C to neutralize Chlorine in the Tap water?" or should that be the investigative question?

Can someone show me some example of the investigative question?

I think Investigative and project question are the same thing, but I also have not heard the term invesitagative question used before.

However, I am concerned about the actual science of this project. It seems to me you too many unkowns- the amount of chlorine in your water and the amount of vit c in juice. I also am not sure what chemistry you think will happen when you react ('neutralize') chlorine with vitamin C or how you would detect this reaction. I think your underlying premise is that there is a lot of chlorine in tap water that needs to be neutralized, and I'm not convinced that is true either. As I understand it, any of the health effects from chlorinated water come from clorine-containing organic compounds created during the chlorine treatment and not from free chlorine itself. I'll admit, I haven't researched this and I'm sure you have. If you haven't, you should make sure you can answer all these questions, and then try to deisgn an experiment that is well controlled. (For example, water treatment plants use different treatments from day to day depending on the starting water quality. So, even if there is a lot of chlorine in the water, the amount on Monday may be totally different than the amount on Thursday. The amount of chlorine in water also depends on the temperature of the water. So, at the very least, you'd need to do all the experiments on the same day with the same batch of water stored at a constant temperature.)

There is a project for measuring vitamin C in juice on the sciencebuddies page here, which is a well controlled experiment:
https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... ?from=Home
You could use these methods to test the vit c in different juices.

Good luck.

Louise

[deleted-71447]

Hi,
Interesting topic. I was also a little confused at first about the vitamin C - chlorine connection, but after doing some research I can see that there is some real merit to the topic. This document has a very nice summary of the main issues of using vitamin C for dechlorination:
http://www.fs.fed.us/eng/pubs/pdf/05231301.pdf

I'm not sure how you plan to make use of vitamin C from fruit for this reaction. There are many other compounds in fruit that can also react with free chlorine. I'll be interested to hear more about your ideas.

Regards,
Chris