Literature on Van’t Hoff’s law states that water potentials and zero weight change osmolalities will be the same for potato cores placed in varying concentrations of solutes of NaCl, glucose, and sucrose. This experiment was designed to test these predictions and compare them to data gathered course wide. We found that the mean water potentials were all within 0.26 bars of each other, and that the zero weight change osmolalities were all within 0.035 mols of each other. This supported Van’t Hoff’s predictions that water potentials and osmolalities would be the same. We had to collect potato core samples in order to do this, and measure and dry them. There were four three different solutes that the cores were placed in, each with varying …show more content…
The solution my group used was NaCl, and we used varying concentrations to see if that would affect the osmolality of our potato cores. Our explanatory hypothesis was that concentrations of a solution and osmolality of potato cores would be unrelated. We predicted that even though there were varying concentrations of solute, potato osmolality would be unaffected. The purpose of the experiment was to test Van’t Hoff’s Law for ourselves, and see if-as a class-we came to the same conclusion he did. We also wanted to see if his prediction about differing solutes was true. To do this, each group in the class tested either glucose, sucrose, or NaCl and we entered our results in a graph that was presented on the projector. Our null hypothesis was that the estimated water potentials for the three solutes will be the same, and that the zero-change osmolality points will be the same for the three …show more content…
Kosinski’s website, we performed this experiment. We used a regular white potato for our experiment and used a corer to bore cores out of the inside of the potato. After drying the cores, they were weighed and placed in a solution of NaCl. After an hour and a half, they were taken out of the solutions, dried, and weighed again. We then ran a paired chi-squared test on our results and entered them into a class-wide table and graph. The materials used were: two potatoes, a potato corer, a scale, and beakers of varying concentrations of solute.