Grass Case

It is in our nature to observe the world around us and be curious of how things work. For many years, scientists and people in general have been trying to figure out why things are the way they are. The scientific method is a series of six organized steps used as a guideline to find out the answer to your questions about your observations.

This method starts with an observation. The observation can be about anything that you notice that arises questions in your mind, usually about something that is more common to a certain group, or something that shows a pattern. The next step is to research the subject to try and find out as much about it as you can, so that you can formulate a hypothesis, a prediction, or educated guess, of what is causing what you observed. After completing the third step of formulating the hypothesis, it is time to design an experiment that will test the hypothesis and either confirm it or reject it.

As part of your experiment, it is important to have an independent variable, a dependent variable, and a control. The independent variable is a variety of things that you will test to check your hypothesis, for example different foods to the same animals to see what the different outcomes will be, if any. The dependent variable is what happens in response to the different independent variables, for example the changes in weight in those animals. The control is the part of the experiment that is kept neutral, and it is used to compare the results from the other experiments.

I have observed that in springtime, when grass begins to grow, it does not grow for about three inches from the driveway, the same area where, during the winter, I have been spreading salt daily to melt the snow. In addition, the grass is growing slower for up to one foot from the driveway. Upon observing this, a question arose in my mind, that salt might be inhibiting the growth of the grass in my front lawn. Also, because grass is slowly growing for up to a foot from where the salt was, I believe that the salt is seeping down to the roots and causing damage. I also believe that the salt melts the ice into water and that helps carry it down to the root.

Plants need water to transport nutrients throughout the plant, to support its shape, and to create energy. Researching the matter, I have found that salt dehydrates the root. This happens for two reasons, first salt soaks up water that surrounds the plant and the root, and second, because of osmosis, where water molecules diffuse from an area of high concentration to an area of low concentration. When the salt soaks up all the water from the soil that surrounds the root, the root becomes the area of high concentration, and to create balance by osmosis, the water flows out of the root, dehydrating it. Also, water is needed in photosynthesis, and the plant needs photosynthesis to produce energy to sustain its own life. By absorbing the water, and causing water to