Conclusion

This study aims to find out if the concentration of vinegar would affect the rate of moulding of a cucumber over a period of time. This links to how much vinegar you can possibly add into your achar dish, so as to preserve them according to the number of shelf life days. Majority of the data shows a trend where cucumbers grow more mould when the concentration of vinegar it is placed in is lower. With the set of data obtained, I can conclude that the concentration of vinegar does affect the rate of moulding of cucumbers over a period of time. The higher the concentration of vinegar, the slower the rate of moulding of the cucumber. Therefore, I can prove that the acidity of the vinegar which is manipulated by the concentration of vinegar plays an important role in the preservation of the cucumbers. This finding therefore proves my hypothesis right!

Pictures of Experimental process

Labelling the containers!


Cuttting the cucumbers into slices of about 2.5cm in diameter and 0.3cm in thickness!


Sunning the cucumber pieces for 26 hours!


Covering the setups with clingwrap so as to maintain high humidity for the cucumber and to prevent contamination of other substances from the surroundings during the period of 10 days!

Results of the experiment!

Data One:

Data Two:

Data Three:

Experiment Procedure(:

Step One: Research on the topic of Preservation and Acidity.
Step Two: Using the knife and ruler, cut the Japanese cucumber into 6 slices of about 3cm in diameter and 0.2cm in thickness. Discard slices which are not within the margin of error of 0.1cm.

Step Three: Place each of the 6 slices into the small rounded containers.
Step Four: Leave the slices of cucumbers under the sun and air them for at least 24 hours.
Step Five: Label the 6 containers as different setups, naming them:
Setup A->100% vinegar
-contains 25ml of vinegar and no water
Setup B->80% vinegar
-contains 20ml of vinegar and 5ml of water
Setup C->60% vinegar
-contains 15ml vinegar and 10ml of water
Setup D->40% vinegar
-contains 10ml vinegar and 15ml of water
Setup E->20% vinegar
-contains 5ml vinegar and 20ml of water
Setup F->100% water(control)
-contains 25ml of water and no vinegar

Consultation session with Miss Tan!

During the consultation session, Miss Tan told me to:
-change my experimental setup by having 6 setups instead of 4 setups only!
-repeat this experiment 3 times. Since my consultation session was scheduled on the last day, there was not enough time to repeat this experiment 3 times one after another. Therefore, I was advised to conduct it simultaneously!


Time to repeat my experiments!

First 3 days of experiment.

On the first 3 days of experiment, there has been no change in all the cucumbers! I should just wait for the change in surface of the cucumbers soon enough!

3 set ups

For this Concentration experiment, it was to find out if the concentration of vinegar on cucumbers would affect the amount of growth of mould over a period of time. In the photo above,
set up one(far left):
-has 20ml of vinegar added
-has 5ml of water added
set up two(middle):
-has 10ml of vinegar added
-has 15ml of water added
set up three (far right):
-has 25 ml of water added only

Set up Three is the control of this experiment and thus does not have any vinegar added to it. This allows us to compare the other results to this control results, ensuring that the difference in results is due to the changed variable, the concentration of vinegar added, and not other factors.