Be A Good Consumer

How Long Will The Flavor Last In Your Gum? By: Kelci and Samantha

Introduction:

The topic of our research article is to find out what type of spearmint chewing gum flavor lasts the longest. We became interested in this topic because both of us like spearmint gum and we wanted to see which kind of gum we should buy at the store. During our research we attempted to answer the following questions:

-What type of gum flavor lasts the longest?

-Does everybody's taste buds work the same?

-Is there one ingredient that might make the flavor last longer?

Background Information:

We went to the Internet and found some general information about how gum is made. We found that all gums include sweeteners and softeners to make the gum a chewy, soft, and sweet substance. This is all the background information we found.

Experiment

Hypothesis-

Our hypothesis was that the flavor in "Extra" brand of gum would last the longest because the label says, "Long Lasting Flavor".

Procedure-

1. Buy different brands of gum for the experiment.

2. Make data chart.

3. Every chewer takes a piece of the same brand of gum and starts chewing on the timer.

4. Stop every two minutes to see if the gum flavor is "dead or alive".

5. After all of the gum for one brand is "dead" repeat steps 3 and 4.

Conclusion-

After doing our experiment, we figured out that "Eclipse" gum flavor lasted the longest. On average, the flavor lasted 24 minutes. The second longest was the "Ice Breakers" brand, which lasted on average 13 minutes. Three brands of gum lasted only 4 minutes. These were "Clorets", "Doublemint", and "Dentyne Ice". Our hypothesis was incorrect. We thought that "Extra" gum would last the longest, but on average but on average the flavor lasted only 10 minutes.

Problems:

Some problems we had were that:

- Some people left early.

- The people had the gum taste in their mouth and it was hard to find out when the real flavor was gone,

- Sometimes we could not hear the timer go off.

Future Investigating:

In the future, researchers may want to find out the amount of each ingredient and if it affects the gum. Also, they might want to get lots of people who they know will be there the whole time.

Bibliography-

One of our resources was the website: http: //bubblegum. com/qanda/howmade/. This was our main reference.

Example of Data Chart

Data Results