Purpose: The purpose of this investigation is to measure the arm span, in centimetres, and the height, in centimetres, of Grade 11 IB Biology students and determine if there is a significant difference in the means of the two measurements.
Hypothesis: IF the arm span and height of Grade 11 IB Biology students are measured and the means compared, THEN the mean of the arm spans will be the same as the mean of the heights. This is expected BECAUSE in Leonardo da Vinci’s famous drawing, The Vitruvian Man, he outlines correlations between the ideal human proportions using a square to compare a man’s height to his outstretched arms (Gorman, 2002). Furthermore, growth in the human body is stimulated by growth hormone (Campbell and Reece, 2002), which may equally affect the lengthening of bones in the legs, spine, shoulders, and arms.
Experimental Design: The independent variable is the choice of parts to measure and …show more content…
Ethnicity of the subjects affected the data collected, as shown in Table 1. There was a wide range of ethnicities of the subjects but not all ethnicities were represented. Almost half of the subjects were of Indian, Scottish, or Chinese decent and no other ethnicity was represented more than once. Of those subjects, two of them represented almost the largest difference between height and arm span, besides one Canadian subject. Between those 3 subjects, all with arm span great then height, the average difference in height and arm span is13.6 cm contributing to the greater standard deviation in the arm span data as compared to the height data as shown in Table 3. There may be a greater difference in arm span compared to height in different ethnicities, which was also concluded by Reeve et al., 1996. They found a significant difference between arm span and height in Afro Caribbean individuals of both genders, and in Asian