Drugs and disease 12.1 Drugs Worksheet 12.1.

3
Lesson 1



Improving your investigation
You have investigated how caffeine affects reaction times.
But did you use the best possible method?
• Read each question.
How many can you answer ‘yes’ to?
1 Most drinks contain sugar as well as caffeine.
Did you compare the caffeine drink with a similar one without caffeine?

yes

2 Most people drink a whole can or bottle. That’s 300–500 cm3.

Did you test realistic amounts of drink?

yes
3 Caffeine takes about 30 minutes to get into your blood.
Did you wait long enough before you did the tests?

no
4 People’s reaction times vary.
Did you measure them at least five times and calculate an average?

no
5 People react faster when they think they’ve drunk caffeine, even if they
haven’t. Scientists call this the placebo effect.
Did you avoid it by giving your volunteers unlabelled drinks so they didn’t
know whether they were drinking caffeine or not?

no
6 Drugs such as caffeine affect different people in different ways.
Did you test the same people with and without caffeine?

yes

7 Scientists have shown that our reaction times are different when we react to
things we see and things we hear. Did you test them both?

no
8 Reaction times are quite short.
Did your method let you to measure the time very precisely?

yes

• Which of these questions you answered ‘no’ to are most important?

Describe how you would change your method if you had to repeat this
investigation.

Number 3. i should wait some time before testing the reactions

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