A Tasty Experiment
The nose is used for smelling, which is helpful to identify foods.Copyright http://marshallteachers.sandi.net/teacher_sites/gillum/nervous%20system/Nervsysdirect.html
Students conduct an experiment to determine whether or not the sense of smell is important to being able to recognize foods by taste. They do this by attempting to identify several different foods that have similar textures. For some of the attempts, students hold their noses and close their eyes, while for others they only close their eyes. After they have conducted the experiment, they create bar graphs showing the number of correct and incorrect identifications for the two different experimental conditions tested.
Chemical and food engineers use information about how people sense taste to develop artificial flavors that taste more like the real flavors they are designed to mimic.
After this activity, students should be able to:
- Explain the importance of the sense of smell to the ability of humans to recognize familiar foods.
- Explain why it is adaptive for an animal to use its senses to identify foods as being either nutritious or noxious.
- Create bar graphs comparing quantities of different items.
- Interpret bar graphs comparing quantities of different items.