ShmoopTube

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Here’s your Shmoop du jour, brought to you by stink lines--

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Indicating smells visually for over 60 years.

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 Here’s a passage about an experiment performed on the communication of honey bees.

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Why don’t you “comb” over it?

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And our question is: “Which of the following is the control for this experiment?”

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Here are your potential answers…

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The question’s asking what the scientists used as a control.

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No, not like a joystick. You know, a scientific control.

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Let’s go back to Science 101 for a second.

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The “control group” or “control” in a scientific experiment is a test sample

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that is separate from the variable being tested. For example, if we’re developing a new plant

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food and we wanted to analyze its effects, we’d grow two identical plants with water

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and sun, and only test the food on one of them.

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The water-only plant would be our “control group” that we could use to compare the

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effect of our plant food on the other. That makes perfect sense.

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To find things that stand out—in this case, the scent created by certain bee dances--

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the scientists needed a control:

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a sample of air that was not exposed to such delightful, albeit stinky, dancing.

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The passage says figure A is a sample that was taken of air near the dance floor.

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That’s where they’re looking for the variable scent, so that’s not the control.

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The control would be the sample in figure B, which was taken somewhere else:

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where there were honey and bees present, but no dancing.

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Of the four possible answers, A is our match.

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That’s A as in “Absolutely Adorable Appetite-Activating Articulation”

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…or, “Alliteration.”

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