ACT Science Question of the Day

During digestion, the energy in food is converted to energy the body can use. Scientists use calorimetry experiments to measure the calories, or energy, provided by food when it is digested or burned.

The relationship used to find the heat transferred energy is given by , where is the mass of the material, is the given specific heat capacity, and is the change in temperature of the material.

In this experiment, food was burned over a Bunsen burner under a can of 200 ml of water. The temperature change of the water and mass change of the food can be used to determine the calories in four different food items.

Table 1 shows the values of the change of mass of the food items, the change in temperature of the water and the energy. Table 2 shows the energy to mass ratio of three of those food items.

Table 1

Roasted Peanut Peanut Cracker Cheese Puff

Water Temp. Initial 23.9 °C 33.2 °C 40.3 °C 53.9 °C

Water Temp. Final 30.0 °C 40.9 °C 55.9 °C 62.8 °C

Food Mass Initial 0.69 g 0.61 g 3.21 g 1.22 g

Food Mass Final 0.38 g 0.21 g 0.91 g 0.48 g

Energy 1.22 Cal 1.54 Cal 3.12 Cal 1.78 Cal

Table 2

Sample Energy to Mass Ratio (Cal/g)

1 1.36

2 3.93

3 2.40

What is a controlled variable in this experiment?