| Explore | We know that plants are living things which need water, carbon dioxide, and sunlight to live. They do photosynthesis and cellular respiration to survive. They grow in a variety of biomes. |
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| Research Question | Will a salt and water mixture effect the efficiency of photosynthesis in a plant when compared to plants in regular distilled water? |
| Predictions | The plants in the cup with salt water will photosynthesize less efficiently than the plants in the cup with distilled water. |
| Experimental Design | We will remove the gasses in the spinach leaf disks by creating a vacuum in the syringe. Next we will make a 1/4% salt mixture with 2.5 grams of salt and the rest of the 100 mL in water. We will place 10 spinach leaf disks in one beaker with the 1/4% salt mixture and another 10 spinach leaf disks in a beaker with 100 mL of distilled water. We will put 2 grams of baking soda in each beaker along with three drops of soap. We will leave both beakers under the same light and record how many spinach leaf disks are floating after every minute for 10 minutes. |
| Conclusion | Salt boosts the effect of photosynthesis of spinach. The data we collected showed that at 6 minutes all the salt soaked leaf discs were all floating. The discs without salt took longer to float, so they took longer to undergo photosynthesis than the salt soaked discs. Other experiments to expand the results of this one could be this same experiment using different plants to see if photosynthesis boosts using salt on just a few plants or lots of plants. |
| Investigation Theme | POS |
| Grade Level | High School Students (Grades 9,10,11,12) |
| School Name | Fair Lawn high school |
| Session | Fall 2017 |