Scioly.org

Can you name a land plant that couldn't be grown in a garden? With twenty nutrients and who-knows-how-many groups of plants, that still seems like a lot of info to me.

"They could theoretically ask you the specific nutritional requirements for maximum yield of any plant in the world, though, and stay within spec." Yeah, that's not going to do much to differentiate teams, though (at least those that have put any work into the event). I mean one entire page of my cheat sheet is the nutrient requirements of about 100 plants. I'm sure they could find some obscure plants to do but every team would get it wrong anyway unless they guessed correctly.

Food science was an event for 3 years in division C. I think the rules are meant to be vague in these events, and I don't think it has to do with the length that the event has been around. When forensics was an event for 2 years, it had very specific rules. Ecology's rules in its first year were basically as specific as they are right now. I think the third chem events' rules are meant to be vague because as I said before they make these events more about being able to do a lab on a fly than their named topic.

gneissisnice wrote:Ugh, I just did terribly at this event at states. 39th place =(. The test was much longer than we thought, so we didnt split it, and we had to test for a chloride ion, which would have been easy, except we had to put filter paper in a funnel and put soil in there, and then add water to get a solution we could test. But the water didnt drip down the funnel, it just got absorbed in the paper. We wasted a few minutes doing it, and we ended up not getting to put anything for an answer. We also had to leave a few other stuff blank =(.
I forgot that NY states makes every chem event ridiculously full of chemistry and removes the other factors (i.e. food or environment).
And phenyl, please dont hurt me for my bad score

Was that the only way you could test for the ion? Wow, that's a terrible experiment.

Flavorflav wrote:Can you name a land plant that couldn't be grown in a garden? With twenty nutrients and who-knows-how-many groups of plants, that still seems like a lot of info to me.

This is a technicality, but it's not a "garden" if any fruit-bearing tree is grown there, it's an "orchard". Therefore, fruit-bearing trees would be out. I don't know, that wasn't an especially serious comment, I was just pointing out that if that's how you want to look at the rules, you could also go one further and take the end of that sentence as a vital bit of information.

Fruits won't be included, probably.

Yes they are. On tests, if i recall fully, I've seen apples, peanuts, blueberries, cherries, lettuce, onions, peppers, tomatoes, corn, peaches, and even mushrooms, which arent even plants. There were a few others but i cant remember.
And for some reason, we got asked the chemical formulae of gypsum and quartz. Which I knew thanks to rocks, but that was kinda weird.

Gypsum I can almost see, since it's a by-product of old methods of fertilizer production, but quartz? That's so random.

SiO2
Why would they have mushrooms?

i dont know. They arent plants.
And the question for quartz was "Sand is usually made up of weathered quartz. What is the formula for quartz?"
And quartz is really SiO4, but the closest choice was SiO2.

Oh... yeah, that's a nice failure of a question there...