Transcript

JANET SUMNER

Hello and welcome to Week 3. Over the last two weeks you've investigated the physical properties of some materials, both solid and liquids. And you've also investigated how water can move through a cell wall, which showed us one of the molecular properties.

This week your simple experiment is going to look at something more complicated, something biological. You're going to do an experiment using a living organism and investigate the conditions under which that organism grows the best. We're going to investigate the growth of yeast, the substance responsible for making bread rise and turning water into beer.

Yeast is an organism called a fungi and it sits in the same group of living things as mushrooms, toad stools, and moulds, and obviously it's hugely important to humans. By looking at the growth of yeast you will learn about how to control an experiment, and about the biological process called respiration. This is when living things consume food to grow.

We look forward to you joining the discussion about your experimental results in the forums.