How much water is in an orange?

	Project title: How much water is in an orange?
Difficulty level:	High school
Main link:	None

Hypothesis:

Since there is a lot of liquid juice in an orange, our hypothesis states that there will be 50% or more water in an orange. P.S. I want to know if this is a high school level science project. Please tell me.

Materials:

1. An orange
2. Kitchen knife
3. Paper plate
4. Aluminum foil
5. Weighing Scale

The Procedure:

Weigh the orange

-Weigh the paper and aluminum foil which is being used to dry the orange in.

-Cut the orange in very thin slices to speed up the drying process.

-Spread the slices over the paper, which is placed on the aluminum foil.

-Keep it in a warm place until it is fully dry. You can expect it to take 4-36 hours depending on the heat and airflow. We used a desk light with a 150 watt lamp and a fan as a drier. We mounted our desk light to be about a foot above the sliced oranges and place the fan about 10 feet away from the orange slices facing the oranges to create airflow. In this way we completed the drying process in 10 hours.

-Weigh the orange slices once fully dried. Don't forget to deduct the weight of the paper and the aluminum foil if you are weighing the orange slices with the paper and aluminum foil.

Results:

After the orange slices where completely dry, we put them back on the weighing scale and weighed it with the paper and aluminum foil. We then subtracted 15 grams from that total since the foil and paper weighed 15 grams. Just like we stated before, the orange weighed 309 grams before the experiment was started and now weigh 58 grams. To figure out the percentage of solids in the orange, we divide the weight of dry sample to the weight of original sample that is : (58/309=0.1877). To figure out the percentage of water in the orange, we used this formula: (309-58)/309=0.8122
In result of our experiment, we found out that orange is consisted of 81% water.