Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

Hello,
My daughter is doing a project on measuring her taste threshold and we are having a bit of trouble figuring out how to gragh the data. Can you please help? Thank you

IsabelV wrote:Hello,
My daughter is doing a project on measuring her taste threshold and we are having a bit of trouble figuring out how to gragh the data. Can you please help? Thank you

Hi IsabelV!

I would be happy to help you out here.

Luckily, I found a resource for you from ScienceBuddies that gives you an entire overview on the experimental procedure of this topic: Measuring Taste Threshold.

https://www.sciencebuddies.org/science- ... p013.shtml
The resource quotes, " In this experiment, you will determine your own taste thresholds for sweet, sour and salty solutions. You will start with a 10% solution, and use the process of serial dilution to make a series of solutions, each 10-fold weaker than the preceding one (i.e., 1%, 0.1%, 0.001%, etc.) If done properly, this is an extremely accurate method."

If you are having trouble with the graphing part, here is a tip:

1. Define your x and y variables on the graphing plot. ( ex. x=substance, such as sucrose, sodium chloride, vinegar. y=concentrations in percentage/molarity/etc.)

2. Set your intervals for the y axis to fit your entire concentration set. Don't set the intervals too narrow!

3. Graph each concentration for each substance with different colored pencils/pens.

4. Circle all the data points.

5. You will have more than one line, since you graphed each substance with its concentration on the same plot.

I hope this clarifies things up.

Good luck!

-Grace

Thank You for the infomation.
It did help, but we are still confused as to visually plotting this graph. We may be looking at this a little too hard and it propably is rather straight forward. Does anyone know of a taste threshold graph that we can look at as an example. Thank You

The kind of graph you produce depends on what data you have! Grace gave you some good advice based on the Science Buddies project, but your visual presentation will depend on your daughter's data. Can you explain (or even include) her data, so we can give you more specific advice?

Heather

There is a pdf of a scholarly journal publication you can download which measured taste threshold and it contains graphs based on different typed of data collected. It may be able to give you an idea of ways you can display your taste threshold data descriptively. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1 ... 2419.x/pdf I hope this helps!