Evaluation
I would consider the experiment and investigation as a whole to have gone underway the way I expected it to without any major errors or disturbances. However, even though it may have seemed to go to plan, there is still the underlying question of how accurate and more importantly how reliable the tests and the results are.
Several factors could have affected and introduced errors into the accuracy of the testing. The surface area is the first. Being able to cut all the potato cylinders so that they had the exactly the same surface area would be very hard and so there may have been some deviation. Surface area affects the rate of osmosis so if 24 hours was not enough to allow full osmosis to take place then the surface area should be taken into account as an erroneous factor. The recording of the masses of the potatoes would also be severely flawed. During the time lag between weighing and using, the potato there could have been a loss in mass due to evaporation of moisture or water being absorbed out of the potato by contacting surfaces. Since the differences in start and finish mass are quite small, the loss of water from the potatoes before and after osmosis would have a visible effect.
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