Wednesday, May 04, 2005

The Spanish AP Test

I took the AP test today, and my apprehension was justified. The test consisted of four parts: listening, reading, writing, and speaking. Of the four, I would say I did the worst by far on the reading section, in which I left a third to a half of the questions blank. I do not have much of an idea about what I will earn on this test, though I doubt that I will earn a 5 (the highest score).

As well, today we had a lab in Chemistry relating to colorimetric analysis of solution concentration. The scenario was that a dead man was found drowned with water with a significant concentration of phosphate in the water. The three suspects are the man's two sons and his daughter. One son owns a pool; the other owns a farm pond; the daughter owns a mine pond. In the lab, measured amounts of "water samples" from each of the bodies of water are combined with heavily acidic ammonium molybdate and tin chloride to produce "molybdinum blue", which is put through a colorimeter, which sends light through the sample and tells how much is absorbed. The frustrating thing was that my group found the water from the man's lungs to have a phosphate concentration that was in between that from the pool and from the mine. The other two groups found it to be from the pool; so our group made some silly mistake along the way.

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