The Paper Towel Experiment is a project about which type of paper can absorb more water.
In every store, big or small, there are numerous brands of paper towels available, each claiming to be the best, the most absorbent or the cheapest. How do we prove or disprove these claims? How do we work out which paper towels are truly great and which are almost entirely useless?
We have all seen advertisements where two brands of paper towels are compared by observing how quickly or thoroughly they suck up a mysterious blue liquid or by wiping up some muddy footprints from their kitchen floor.
This, as we know, is not very scientific - there are no figures, no proof and little truth.
Here we are going to show you how to conduct an experiment to test one of these claims: the absorbency of paper towels.
“More expensive brands of paper towel are more absorbent.”
Work out an average for each result and write down in a table.
Plot all of your results onto a simple bar graph like the one below; you can do this on a computer or you can use graph paper and pencils.
This will allow you to show which brand of paper towel is the most absorbent and which is truly awful.
Of course, this is a very simple experiment and it does have some limitations; you are testing only one reason why people choose a certain brand.
Some brands might be excellent at soaking up spills but are very expensive. Maybe some brands are not as good at soaking up water but are better at soaking up other liquids like milk or cooking oil.
When a consumer buys paper towels, they are not just looking for absorbency. Price, softness, availability, number of sheets on a roll, and strength are all important factors when buying a roll of kitchen towel.
Perhaps you could design an experiment to rate the strength and softness, or try and calculate how much each towel costs per sheet.
Paper towel manufacturers spend millions of dollars every year but, with a few simple experiments, you can find out which brands truly are the best.
Martyn Shuttleworth (Sep 21, 2008). Paper Towel Experiment. Retrieved Nov 13, 2024 from Explorable.com: https://explorable.com/paper-towel-experiment
The text in this article is licensed under the Creative Commons-License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
This means you're free to copy, share and adapt any parts (or all) of the text in the article, as long as you give appropriate credit and provide a link/reference to this page.
That is it. You don't need our permission to copy the article; just include a link/reference back to this page. You can use it freely (with some kind of link), and we're also okay with people reprinting in publications like books, blogs, newsletters, course-material, papers, wikipedia and presentations (with clear attribution).
Want the full version to study at home, take to school or just scribble on?
Whether you are an academic novice, or you simply want to brush up your skills, this book will take your academic writing skills to the next level.
Download electronic versions:
- Epub for mobiles and tablets
- For Kindle here
- PDF version here