Can someone clearly explain to me what a control group is and what a constant is? make it really easy to understand|||Imagine you want to find out if GrowGrowGrow fertilizer is any good. You plan to test it on radishes and carrots. You'll probably plant ten batches of each vegetable, with various amounts of the fertilizer. One batch won't get any of the fertilizer. That's the "control" group.
You'll make every effort to ensure that all ten batches, including the control group, get exactly the same treatment except for the amount of fertilizer. Your experiment will hold the sunlight, the water, the temperature, the brand of seed, the type of soil, and so on, to be the same for all ten batches. You'll be varying just one thing, and keeping the other parameters constant. Except that they'll probably vary over time, but will vary the same way for all ten batches.
Does that make sense? I hope that it matches the definitions your textbook and your teacher are using.
The idea is that you have to change just one thing at a time, so that you can make sense out of your results. Doing the work that way can make the work tedious, but can give you good results. Sometimes scientists have to vary more than one parameter at a time, and the mathematics to understand their results can get very complicated. See the reference for multivariate analysis.
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