Do People Have Different Tastes?

By Nelly, Nasreen, and Britney

Our topic of our investigations was about tastes and the different areas on the tongue. We chose this investigation because we thought taste-testing would be fun. We knew that there were different parts of the tongue that detected certain tastes and we were wondering if people had the same reactions to different tastes. That’s what led to our question, do people have different tastes?

There are tastebuds covering people’s tongues. The different tastes they can detect are sour, sweet, salt, and bitter. There are different areas of the tongue that can detect certain tastes better than others—the tip, back, and edges of the tongue. We were curious to see if we put a certain taste on a different part of the tongue, would the person be able to identify it.

First, we gathered vinegar for the sour taste, sugar for the sweet, and coffee for the bitter taste. Someone had forgotten to bring the salt. Then we dropped the flavors on different parts of the tongue to see if people could identify the tastes. Finally, we recorded our results on a table.

[insert drawing and chart]

We were surprised that so many people thought that the vinegar was sweet. We discovered that people do have different tastes.

We would like to repeat our investigation, this time with salt. We are interested in finding out exactly which part of the tongue identifies which taste and if it’s the same in different people.