Monday, October 26, 2015

2.48 Describe experiments to investigate the effect of exercise on breathing in humans.

When you exercise, sometimes you end up respiring anaerobically as the body cannot get oxygen around quickly enough. Of course, this depends on the intensity of the exercise. This could be investigated as follows:

  • Ask a friend to volunteer 
  • At rest, have them lie down on the ground (belly up) and count how many times their chest rises in one minute. Record the result.
  • Now, ask them to walk 100m (or any other given distance). Measure their breathing rate the same way as before. 
  • Then ask them to run 100m. Measure breathing rate again.
  • Finally, ask them to sprint 100m. Measure their breathing rate again.
  • Wait until the person's breathing rate has returned to normal. Repeat the experiment from the start 3 times.
  • Take an average of the results
  • Plot a graph of your results
  • Remember to keep the person, distance run, and environment the same.
Dependent variable: Breathing rate (breaths per minute)
Independent variable: Intensity of exercise
Control variables: Distance (100m), person doing the exercise (fitness must be the same), environment (i.e not have one in super hot conditions and another in freezing cold)

Note: results that differ by more that 0.2 should be ignored and should thus not be taken into consideration when taking an average.

An example graph can be seen below. THIS GRAPH DOES NOT EXPRESS THE RESULTS OF THE EXACT EXPERIMENT DESCRIBED but it does express the same idea.
Conclusion: As exercise intensity increases, the breathing rate increases as well.

Sometimes, the image doesn't show up, so the link to it can be found here





2 comments:

  1. This data shows that during different types of exercise, the breathing rate will increase. Although slightly confusing (reading a book is hardly exercise) it does show a steady increase as the intensity increases. This however is where the positives end. The times for each intensity are not shown and although it does show an increase it is represented in a bar graph, not a line graph which is not only easier to read but can also show range and can be used to interpret other times. The method is extremely different to the data she is representing, it could almost be for a different test. Matos also has not done any repeats of her data and therefore will not have a range, percentage error or proof of repeatability.

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  2. This set of data is not similar to mine as it is focusing on the intensity of exercise where as I focused on the effect of time. Another difference is that she put her data into a bar chart whereas mine is on a line graph. And as far as I can see she has only tested each intensity once when I did mine three times so that I can look for outliers. A limitation that arises is that there is no clear resting breathing rate so we do not have anything to compare it with. I can only assume that reading a book is also the resting rate but they do not make it clear. Also as it is on a bar graph, I cannot see the exact number of breaths per minute. Furthermore because there was no repeats, we can’t finds an average or outlier which in turn decrease the reliability of the test. Overall I am not confident in this data as it is not clearly presented on the graph and has no repeats to check for outliers. It has been peer reviewed by an unknown source so that does make it a little bit more accurate.

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