Question Video: Identifying Anomalies in a Titration Data Set Chemistry

Video Transcript

A student performed a titration and recorded the volume of acid needed to neutralize a base. The experiment was repeated five times and the results were collected in a table. Which result of repeated titration can be considered an anomaly?

An anomaly is a data point that differs significantly from other observations. This is sometimes called an outlier. Plotting the data on a number line will allow us to easily see the distribution of our data. We can see that the majority of our data points are clustered between 17.6 centimeters cubed and 18.0 centimeters cubed, with our data point at 16.8 falling outside of that cluster. Therefore, this data point can be considered an anomaly. In answering the question “Which result of repeated titration can be considered an anomaly?,” the answer is titration three.