Materials you will need:

5 glass vials, clear plastic medicine cups or small Dixie cups with white bottoms (if paper,
these can saturate and make the experiment difficult) the smaller the better.
An eyedropper
Food coloring (not yellow)
(Optional, if you have one) digital camera

1. Line up the five glass vials or Dixie cups on a sheet of paper, and number their position on
the paper from 1 to 5.
2. In the first vial (#1) put one drop of food coloring, and then add nine drops of water. You
have now diluted the food coloring by a factor of 10 (1:10).
3. From vial #1, take one drop and transfer it to vial #2. Add 9 drops of clean water.

4. Continue this process for all 5 vials.

5. Complete the data sheet below that shows the progressive dilution at each step.
Container #
Concentration
Exponential

Food Color
1 g/l
100 g/l

1
.1 g/l
10-1 g/l

2
.01 g/l
10-2 g/l

3
.001 g/l
10-3 g/l

4
.0001 g/l
10-4 g/l

5
.00001 g/l
10-5 g/l

6. (Optional) Take a digital picture of your results and save it to your computer. Follow the
instructions on the lesson to post in your message on the discussion board.

Post your results from the table in Investigation 4 in this thread.

If you have a digital camera (or already own one), take a picture of your project and try
posting it too.
After you have posted your results, answer the following questions
1. At what concentration level do you have trouble seeing the color in the water?
I had difficulty seeing the blue coloring in the 4th cup, which was 10-4 g/l.
2. Can you convert that concentration into parts per million?
I needed some outside help with this one. I first made the numerator and denominator have the
same units. 10-4 g/L = .0001g / 1000g. Then I used
http://www.iun.edu/~cpanhd/C101webnotes/aqueoussolns/ppmppb.html to help me set up the
problem (.0001g / 1000g) x 1,000,000 = ppm. This gave me .1ppm
3. Suppose that your food coloring is acid. What is the pH of this concentration where you have
trouble seeing the color? (Hint: look at the exponential scale at the bottom of the table, and refer
to the last paragraph in "Week 4 Notes").
-log 10-4 = 4
I got a little curious and asked What happens when the concentration is less than 10-14? I found
this site (http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/ed083p1465), which was helpful.