Lung Capacity Lab Report

Introduction Every mammal uses their lungs to breathe, but not all lungs are the same. Considering the differences between males and females, it is likely that their lungs would be slightly different. But, would the males or the females have better lungs? The best way to figure out the solution to this question is to measure the vital capacity of both genders. The vital capacity is the amount of air that can be pushed out of the lungs voluntarily (Lung Capacity Measurement Lab Handout). After this, some residual volume--or the small amount of air that remains in the lungs--still stays (Lung Capacity Measurement Lab Handout). If you added the vital capacity and residual volume, you would get the total lung capacity, or the amount of air your lungs can hold (Lung Capacity Measurement Lab Handout). The closest we …show more content…
I found that males--on average--have higher vital capacities and estimated vital capacities than females. I was expecting this result as women’s lungs tend to be around 10% smaller than males (Bellamere, Sex differences in thoracic dimensions and configuration). What surprised me was that the average of females’ actual vital capacities were closer to the estimated ones than the males’. I thought they would be about the same, but amount of exercise and the accurateness of the formula could have played a role in this outcome. If I were to redo this experiment, I would try to use people with similar diets and exercise patterns. I would also make the number of participants of each gender the same, as there were only 4 male participants compared to 10 female participants. Originally I hypothesized that women would have lower lung capacities than men, and this turned out to be true. On average men’s vital capacity is 1.3 times the size of women’s. In the future I’d like to try this experiment again with more similar participants as to not disturb the findings too