“Ouch,” said Kyle, drinking a glass of soda, “my stomach hurts.” Concerned, his

Question

“Ouch,” said Kyle, drinking a glass of soda, “my stomach hurts.”

Concerned, his girlfriend Wendy, asked, “What have you been eating? Did you go to that cheap

wing place again and order the nuclear wings? Because, if you did, it’s your own fault!”

“No,” said Kyle, “I just took some aspirin for my headache. We were up late practicing last night and I

had a slight headache, probably from sleep deprivation. I took some aspirin from the bottle in your medicine chest.”

Wendy knew from experience that aspirin could hurt your stomach, especially if you took it often or had

an ulcer or other kind of stomach problem. But Kyle seemed fine, he is a healthy 20-year old

with no health problems that she knew of.

“Well, how many did you take?” she asked.

“The normal amount, four,” replied Kyle.

“But that’s TWICE the normal dosage!”

“I always take four at home. That’s how many I need to get rid of my headaches

and I’ve never had my stomach hurt like this,” said Kyle.

Hmmm thought Wendy, I wonder why the four aspirin he takes at home don’t upset his stomach like the

ones here do? She asked, “What brand do you take at home?” She knew that she purchased Bayer®

aspirin, had used the same thing for years without any side effects.

“Oh, I don’t know, “ replied Kyle, “something my roommate Stan buys over the Internet. From some site

that has cheap drugs, www.cheapdrugs.com, I think. He can get, like, a thousand aspirin for only $3.50,

including shipping and handling. What a deal. We started out taking 2 pills like the label says, but that

dose never seemed to work, so we started doubling it. My stomach never hurt like this. Maybe there’s

something in them to prevent stomach pain, like an antacid-aspirin hybrid?”

Wendy had taken some chemistry classes during her first year of college and she was doubtful that Kyle’s

Internet aspirin contained both antacid and aspirin. She thought that maybe something else was up. If

only she could get access to the chemistry laboratories, maybe she could find out what these Internet

aspirin contained.

1. How can you test your hypothesis?

2. What information do you need before you can devise a method for testing your hypothesis?

3. What control experiments would you need to perform?

4. Using the list of chemicals and equipment provided, write a detailed procedure in your notebook describing the experiment(s) you will conduct.

You will have the following available in the laboratory:

• Commercial aspirin tablets

• A sample of Kyle’s internet aspirin

•Acetylsalicylic acid

• Standardized NaOH solution

•pH meters

•phenolphthalein

•methanol (used to dissolve the tablets)

• mortar & pestle (to crush tablets)

•burets & buret clamps

•ringstands

•stir plates & stir bars

•assorted glassware

Explanation / Answer

QUESTION 1

Yes, we can get into a few conclusions as to why Kyle needed a larger dosage of the cheap aspirin.

QUESTION 2

We can hypothesize that the internet aspirin tablets contained a lesser amount of active ingredient (acetylsalicylic acid) than the Bayer® aspirin.

QUESTION 3

The above hypothesis can be tested by determining the acetylsalicylic acid content in both the internet aspirin and Bayer® aspirin and comparing them.

QUESTION 4

The following information should be known.

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