Name

Date

Class

Designing an Experiment
Building Vocabulary
Match each term with its definition by writing the letter of the correct definition in the right column on the line beside the term in the left column.

1. ____ controlled experiment 2. ____ hypothesis 3. ____ repeated trial 4. ____ dependent variable 5. ____ scientific explanation 6. ____ bias 7. ____ scientific inquiry 8. ____ independent variable 9. ____ replication

a. a repetition of an experiment b. a generalization that makes sense of observations by using logical reasoning c. an error in the design of the experiment d. the factor that is purposely changed to test a hypothesis e. the process by which people gather evidence about the natural world and propose explanations based on this evidence f. an attempt by a different group of scientists to conduct the same experiment

g. the factor that may change in response to the independent variable h. a possible answer to a scientific question i. a scientific experiment in which only one variable is changed at a time

Fill in the blank to complete each statement.

10. The _____________ variable is the variable that responds to changes. 11. A(n) _____________ is a visual representation, or a picture, of data. 12. Scientists study graphs to help them identify _____________ in the data. 13. A line graph in which the data points yield a straight line is a(n) _____________ graph. 14. A(n) _____________ is a data point that is clearly not part of a graphs tr end.

Mathematics and Scientific Thinking

Descriptive Statistics
December Temperatures, Clearwater Beach Day Temp (F) 20 72 21 68 22 65 23 75 24 80 25 75 26 72 27 60 28 53 29 55 30 53 31 21

1. What is the mean temperature? ______________________________________________________ 2. What is the median temperature? _____________________________________________________ 3. What is the mode temperature? ______________________________________________________ 4. What is the range of temperatures? ___________________________________________________ 5. Which value would be best used to promote the beachs high temperatures? 6. What information does the range give?

Building Vocabulary
Match each term with its definition by writing the letter of the correct definition in the right column on the line beside the term in the left column. 7. ____ mode 8. ____ significant figures 9. ____ anomalous data 10. ____ range 11. ____ percent error 12. ____ mean 13. ____ precision 14. ____ median 15. ____ estimate 16. ____ accuracy a. an approximation of a number, based on reasonable assumptions b. the difference between the greatest and least value in a data set c. the middle number in an ordered set of data d. how close the measurement is to the true or accepted value e. data that do not fit with the rest of the data set f. the numerical average of a set of data

g. the percent difference between a known value and a tested value h. all digits measured exactly, plus one estimated digit i. j. the number that appears most often in a list of numbers how close a group of measurements are to each other