5. Conclusion

1. Conclusion

In the beginning, we carried out the experiment without following the procedure accurately. All the readings were not close to what was stated on the drinks and very inconsistent. After some detailed reading from our references, we found out that we were doing the experiment wrongly. Firstly, we did not use sugar-water solutions with known sugar concentration as a reference point to better measure the amount of sugar in the drinks and make conclusions on the concentration of sugar in the different carbonated sugary drinks. Secondly, we did not ensure the refracted ray (Incident, refracted and emergent rays) was parallel to the base of the hollow prism. This caused our experiment to be inaccurate and inconclusive in our first attempt.

In conclusion, we can safely deduce and answer the following questions that we set out to find out.

Q1. Are the results accurate?

Answer: Yes.

Q2. Are the labels on canned drinks reliable?

Answer: Yes, the sugar concentration printed on the canned drinks are fairly reliable and accurate.

Q3. Can this method be used to find sugar concentration of different liquids?

Answer: We would not recommend to use this method to determine the sugar level of different liquids. This method measures the angle of refraction of light through liquids of different density. in this case, we know that the changes in density is mainly due to the presence of sugar. For other unknown liquids, we do not know if the density of the liquids are due to the presence of sugar, e.g. seawater.

1. Practical Applications

We can use this method to measure the amount of sugar in coffee or tea bought in coffee shops.(The Devil’s Hopyard, 2015) Those drinks come in plastic bags, so we have no idea how much sugar can be in them if there is any.  If there is a high amount of sugar in a coffee shop bought coffee or tea, we can use this information to advocate people on why they are better off making their own coffee at home.

We can also use this experiment to compare for example coffee from different coffee chains and compare what the concentration of sugar is from different coffee chains. Which coffee chain is healthier for you. (Belay and Assefa, 2018)

2. Areas for Further Study

We can make salt solutions with different known concentrations and estimate the salt concentration of salt water samples from different locations.(Tricia L, 2017) We can collect samples from Marina Barrage, were fresh and saltwater meet.