Question

When presented with the question “Does Plant Food X have an effect on the production of tomatoes?” Develop a hypothesis to answer this question and then design a small controlled experiment to test the hypothesis.

WRITER

Answer 1

first you'd construct the "if-then" hypothesis

the experimental condition we are applying goes after the "if", so "if plant food X is applied to the tomatoes..."

our prediction goes after the "then", so

"then the tomatoes will show a statistically significant increase in tomato yield compared to the control group"

Answer 2

then for the experiment you just want to set up 2 conditions, 1 as the control (tomatoes grown w/o the plant food) and 1 as the experimental group (tomatoes grown w/ the plant food), making sure to keep other variables like sunlight, temperature, water, etc. the same

after that you will want to come up with some way to measure the tomato production, such as number of tomatoes, avg. weight, total mass, etc. and some way to compare them, like a t-test