curve of best fit (1 Viewer)

crammy90

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when do we use this instead of a line of best fit?
 

frogbutt

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when the points make an obvious curve shape...or think about the trend it's showing and see if you KNOW that it's not supposed to be linear.

in hsc its usually pretty obvious. they just have some outliers you're supposed to ignore.
 

JasonNg1025

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I haven't seen many situations where you have to plot a curve of best fit.

Use what frogbutt said, however, be careful when something <i>looks</i> like a curve, if it goes sorta similar to a line (curving up very slightly). If the last value is higher, making the line look like a curve, it probably isn't - sometimes they test to see if you can find experimental errors and learn to negate them.
 

crammy90

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now im confused lol
should i just use a line of best fit for everything? ive never been taught curve of best fit...
absorption would be line of best fit yeh?
 

Trebla

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Within the context of the HSC course, I think you're only expected to know how to do a line of best fit, except perhaps for a titration curve?

You should be able to tell theoretically whether some relationship is linear or not. For example, you should know that plotting a calibration curve for AAS shows a linear relationship between absoprtion (A) and concentration (c) (the theoretical equation is given by A = εcl where ε and l are kept as constants, I think it's called the Beer-Lambert law). On the other hand, you should know the shape of a titration curve and why the curve is of that nature. So if you were asked to plot pH changes over time, then you would expect to use a curve of best fit (though it's highly unlikely you will be asked to do that).
 

JasonNg1025

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By some law outside of our syllabus, AAS should technically produce a straight line. Unfortunately, the HSC is not that kind to you...
 

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