Mixed practice test 2, Grades 9–10 — question 4 of 25
Listen to the conversation between Mr. Cole and Hana about her lab report. Then answer the questions.
The Result That Did Not Fit
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Mr. Cole: Hana, I looked at your yeast data. Four of your five trials at forty degrees are close together, and then trial three is almost double the others. What happened there?
Hana: I am not sure. I was going to leave it off the graph so the pattern looks cleaner.
Mr. Cole: I would not do that. If you remove a result just because it does not match, a reader has no way of knowing whether the pattern is real or whether you only kept the results that fit it.
Hana: So I keep it in, even though it is probably a mistake?
Mr. Cole: You keep it in your data table, and you say what you think caused it. Did anything about that trial go differently?
Hana: Actually, yes. I opened a new packet of yeast for trial three. The other four all came from the same packet.
Mr. Cole: That is a real explanation, and it is worth a sentence in your report. Then run two more trials with the new packet tomorrow at lunch. If those come out high too, you have not found a mistake. You have found out something about the yeast.
Choose the best answer.
What did Hana plan to do with the result from trial three?
You can move on without answering. Unanswered questions are counted as wrong.