The following table represents data that were collected by 20 groups of students who compared the respiration rate of mung beans with that of bean beetles. For this experiment, students placed equal weights of bean beetles and mung beans in 2 different respiration chambers similar to the ones you used in lab, and allowed the organisms to respire for 10 minutes. At the end of the 10 minutes, the CO 2 concentration in the chamber was recorded (in parts per million) and entered in the table below (i.e. the table contains 20 replicates of the same experiment).
This table is way too messy to allow you to draw any kind of conclusion by quickly looking at it.
A comparison between the mean values of these two columns would help us simplify the data.
1). What can be determined from this? Can we safely say that these 2 groups are different? Why/why not?
if instead of representing that data with a bar graph, we represented it with a scatter plot, would we be able to determine any additional important information?
Let’s give it a try:
2). What is the advantage of plotting data this way? What can we determine from this data that we could determine from bar graphs?
