Post-Lab Questions
Directions: Answer each of the following questions. All work must be shown to receive credit for calculations.
- Compare your measurements from metric ruler 1 and metric ruler 2. Which ruler allowed you to report measurements with more significant figures? Why is this the case?
- Looking at the area calculations from both sets of data (Metric Rulers 1 and 2), did the level of precision in your original measurements affect the number of significant figures in the calculated area? Provide one example from your data tables.
- A lab partner uses metric ruler 1 to measure a rectangle and reports a length of 4.36 cm. Based on what you know about metric ruler 1’s precision, explain whether this is a reasonable measurement. What would be a more appropriate way to record this value?
- Two students calculate the perimeter of the same rectangle using measurements from metric ruler 1. Which answer is more appropriate, and why? What does the difference in significant figures communicate about the precision of their measurements?
- Student A: 24.3 cm
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Student B: 24.30 cm
5. During the lab, you used a ruler where the smallest scale division was 0.1 cm. Suppose you measured the length of a rectangle and found it to be exactly 3.2 cm according to the markings. How should you record this measurement to correctly reflect the uncertainty based on the tool’s precision?
Licenses and Attribution
CC Licensed Content, Original
This educational material includes AI-generated content from ChatGPT by OpenAI. The original content created by Carol Stallworth from Hillsborough Community College is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0).
All images in this textbook generated with DALL-E are licensed under the terms provided by OpenAI, allowing for their free use, modification, and distribution with appropriate attribution.
