Unit 1 Vocabulary

UNIT 1

VOCABULARY

PRACTICE OF SCIENCE

NATURE OF SCIENCE

GRADE 8

CONCLUSION

•the proposition arrived at by logical reasoning

CONTROLLED VARIABLE

•quantities/items that you want to remain
constant, and must observe them as carefully as the dependent variables.

ENGINEERING

•the application of science and maths to solve
problems. While scientists and inventors come up with innovations, it is engineers who apply these discoveries to the real world.

EXPERIMENT

•the act of conducting a controlled test or investigation

HYPOTHESIS

•In science, a hypothesis is an idea or explanation that you then test through study and experimentation.

Outside science, a theory or guess can also be called a hypothesis

INFERENCE

•an idea or conclusion that's drawn from evidence and reasoning

SCIENTIFIC LAW

•a generalization that describes recurring facts or events in nature.

Explains what happens

MODEL

•a representation of something, most often in a
very scaled size.

OBSERVATION

•facts learned by observing.

OUTCOME VARIABLE (DEPENDENT)

•the item that responds to the change of the
independent variable. The dependent variable depends/changes when
the independent variable is changed.

TEST VARIABLE (INDEPENDENT)

•The independent variable is the one that is
changed by the scientist. To insure a fair test, a good experiment has only ONE independent variable. As the scientist changes the independent variable, he or she records the data that they collect.

REPETITION

•Performing the same procedure or process in order to collect sufficient data.

REPLICATION

•Getting the same result when an experiment is repeated.

SCIENTIFIC THEORY

•an organized system of accepted knowledge that applies in a variety of circumstances to explain a specific set of phenomena.

Explains why it happens