Open water oil spills, such as the Deepwater Horizon spill of 2010, can wreak terrible consequences on the environment and be expensive to clean up. Many physical and biological methods have been developed to recover oil from water surfaces. In the article “Capacity of Straw for Repeated Binding of Crude Oil from Salt Water and Its Effect on Biodegradation” (J. Hazard. Toxic Radioact. Waste, 2012: 75–78), researchers examined how wheat straw could be used to extract crude oil from a water surface. An experiment was conducted in which crude oil (0 to 16.9 g) was added to 100 mL of saltwater in separate Petri dishes. Wheat straw (2 g) was then added to each dish and all dishes were shaken at 70 rpm overnight. The following data read from a graph is based on the amount of oil added (in g) and the corresponding amount of oil recovered (in g) from wheat straw.
Open water oil spills, such as the Deepwater Horizon spill of 2010, can wreak terrible consequences on the environment and be expensive to clean up. Many physical and biological methods have been developed to recover oil from water surfaces. In the article “Capacity of Straw for Repeated Binding of Crude Oil from Salt Water and Its Effect on Biodegradation” (J. Hazard. Toxic Radioact. Waste, 2012: 75–78), researchers examined how wheat straw could be used to extract crude oil from a water surface. An experiment was conducted in which crude oil (0 to 16.9 g) was added to 100 mL of saltwater in separate Petri dishes. Wheat straw (2 g) was then added to each dish and all dishes were shaken at 70 rpm overnight. The following data read from a graph is based on the amount of oil added (in g) and the corresponding amount of oil recovered (in g) from wheat straw.
a. For each observation, determine the percentage of oil recovery by wheat straw. Is this percentage relatively constant across all observations? Was the percentage higher at certain added oil levels over others?
b. Do the values of the recovered oil appear to be perfectly linearly related to the added oil values? Why or why not?
c. Construct a scatterplot of the data. Does it appear that recovered oil could be accurately predicted by the
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