Structure: Aim and Hypothesis
The description of the experiment in your laboratory handout, in conjunction with course notes and possibly by reference to other texts, will provide you with enough information to write your introduction. Typically, your introduction will lead up to a statement of your aim and/or hypothesis.
|In your lab handout, the aim may be written as a phrase:||
- to determine the permeability of the soil used in the flow tanks
- to establish how permeability is affected by the density of a particular soil.
|When you write the introduction to your lab report, you need to change this to a sentence:||This experiment was carried out to determine the permeability of the soil used in the flow tanks and, further, to establish how permeability is affected by the density of a particular soil.|
|If your aim involves testing a hypothesis:||The aim of the experiment was to test the hypotheses that:
1. steady state flow is adequately described by Darcy’s Law
2. permeability and soil density can be determined from the amount of flow.
|Notice that the hypothesis and aim are typically (but not always) expressed in the PAST TENSE:||The hypothesis was that .....
The aim was to ....