Striving+for+Accuracy+and+Precision

In Chemistry rarely do we receive perfect results, so it is important to be accurate and precise during experiments so our results, even if not perfect, make sense. If you are sloppy during the experiment, they why carry it out at all? To be accurate is to come close to the expected/real value and to be precise is to have your data be generally close together. (http://josephineyeo.files.wordpress.com/2008/09/titration.jpg)

A titration is the perfect example of how you have to be precise and accurate in an experiment. One example of titration is an acid base titration. It is a method used in Chemistry that relies on the neutralization of the reaction of acids and bases. We use this process to determine the concentration of an acid or base. The solution will be pink until one more drop of acid is in the base, then the base, and then the solution will turn colorless. It has to be exactly one more drop or else the data will be skewered. In Hospitals doctors use titrations except this time, lives are on the line. They have to be perfect in both accuracy and precision.

In our lab experiment me and my partner didn't know what to expect the first time, so we did a rough trial to get in the ball park of how much acid we needed to drop. Once we did our rough trial, we went through the painstaking process of adding one drop at a time and squirting water around the sides of the flask so the acid drops didn't get stuck. It took us around half an hour of just squirting and slowly dropping the titration, but we were able to succeed with that one more drop. We repeated the experiment and also got similar results. Even though it took us a lot of time, we were able to be accurate and precise.