Name _______________________
Period ______
Lab Report: Percent Sugar in Bubble Gum
Problem: What percent of bubble gum is sugar?
Hypothesis:
__________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________
Experiment:
Materials:
 4 pieces of sugared bubble gum
 plastic cup
 balance
Procedure:
1. Use a balance to determine the mass of a clean plastic cup. Record the mass in
your data table.
2. Unwrap 4 pieces of bubble gum containing sugar and place them in the cup.
3. Determine the mass of the cup and the gum. Record the mass in your data table.
4. Each person in the group should chew a piece of gum to remove the sugar.
5. After about 5 minutes, collect the chewed gum in the massed cup and wash your
hands.
6. Determine the mass of the cup and gum. Record it in your data table.
7. Calculate the mass of sugar dissolved from the gum (original mass of gum – final
mass of gum). Record the answer in your data table.
8. Calculate the percentage of sugar in the gum by dividing the mass of the dissolved
sugar by the mass of the unchewed gum and multiply by 100. Record the answer
in your data table.
Data:
Mass of
Cup +
Unchewed
Gum
Mass of
Plastic
Cup
Mass of
Unchewed
Gum
Mass of
Cup +
Chewed
Gum
Mass
of
Plastic
Cup
Mass of
Chewed
Gum
Mass of
sugar
Percent
of Sugar
Conclusions:
1. What is the percent of sugar? (Show calculations below.)
2. What is the molar mass of the sugar, C12H22O11? (Show your work below.)
3. Convert the mass of dissolved sugar to moles. (Show your work below.)
4. How many molecules of sugar are in the dissolved sugar? (Show you work below.)
5. Write a conclusion:
a. Do you accept or reject your hypothesis? Explain using data.
b. What are some experimental limitations that might cause inaccurate results?
Explain how they might affect results.
c. What did you learn from the experiment?
Sample Conclusion:
We reject our hypothesis. We thought that the bubble gum would be 35% sugar; however,
we found that the bubble gum contained 55% sugar.
There are some limitations in this experiment. We don’t have really accurate scales so our
masses could have been off by a little bit. Also, we only used 4 pieces of gum, so we don’t
have a huge sample size for our data: It would have been good to combine all the data
from our entire class. Smaller sample sizes result in the possibility of outliers having more
of effect on data, so one weird piece of gum could affect your results.
In this experiment we learned a few things. From a chemistry perspective, we learned that
bubble gum is… We also learned that ...