Suppose you are a teaching assistant for the penny experiment, and your job is t
ID: 1719862 • Letter: S
Question
Suppose you are a teaching assistant for the penny experiment, and your job is to review the student's data for possible problems. What would you expect to see in a student's data set for the following problems? What course of action would you suggest to the student? a. A student misreads the balance and puts the decimal point in the wrong place for all 20 measurements. b. One student weighs all 20 pennies without checking to make sure the balance reads zero between each weighing. c. One student misunderstands the instructions and weighs one penny twenty times.Explanation / Answer
a)
Here student's data set would contain incorrect measurements. Since student put decimals in the wrong places, the incorrect data would be a multiple of the currect one by a factor of 10, 100, 0.01 or similar.
Course of action: I would suggest the student to correctly place the decimal points in the data.
b)
The data will not be accurate since the balance reading may not be zero initially. Data would be slightly off from the correct one.
Course of action: Ensure that the balance reads zero before each measurement.
c)
In this case all the measurements will be the same. The data will corresspond to the weight of only one penny.
course of action: Read the instructions carefully. Weigh 20 different pennies instead of weighing one penny 20 times.
d)
The accuracy of this experiment will be limited. The used balance has an can weigh only up to 0.01 grams, A better accuracy is required for the experiment.
Course of action: Wait for an analytical balance. The results will be accurate with this balance.
e)
This experiment requires all the pennies to be of the same type. Hence if a 1982 penny is used, the exzperiment will give inaccurate results.
Course of action: Check all the pennies thoroughly before conducting the experiment. Ensure that all the pennies are of the same type.