What’s the Difference Between the Scientific Terms “trial” “treatment” and “sample”?

Question by xJanirax: What’s the difference between the scientific terms “trial” “treatment” and “sample”?

Best answer:

Answer by PaulCyp
“Sample” refers to a representative portion of physical material. For example, you might gather samples of soil from different locations, or samples of water from different ponds, or samples of fruit from different markets.

“Treatment” is what you do to the materials, how you change them or test them, in order to produce an observable effect. If you put different kinds of fertilizer in different soil samples, or adjust the pH of water used in testing, or apply a substance of any kind, those are treatments.

“Trials” refers to the number of times you perform an experiment. The more times you can repeat the experiment and get the same results, the more valid your results are. An experiment that involves only one trial isn’t very convincing. It might just be a fluke, and a second trial might produce entirely different results. For a science fair there should usually be at least 3 trials, more is better. In advanced research, a new drug isn’t allowed on the market until has undergone hundreds of trials under many different conditions.

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