Dirty Money

How Dirty is Money?

How dirty is money? I thought money would be extremely dirty since it has been passed on to tons of people. I chose this topic because in the summer, my aunt’s mom was giving me ideas on what to do for the science fair, and she said, “Make your project on how dirty money is.” I thought it was a good idea, and I didn’t have any other ideas, so I went with that.

When I started the experiment, I first dipped a swab in distilled water and swabbed a dollar. Next, I rubbed the swab on the agar plate in a zig zag motion. I then closed the agar plate and sealed it with tape. Lastly, I put the plate in an incubator. I did this with 8 other agar plates. I also sealed an agar plate that wasn’t swabbed, as a control. So in total, I used 10 agar plates. To collect the data, I traced the agar plates and the bacteria on a clear sheet. Then I put a piece of graph paper (1mm2) underneath the clear sheet, and counted how many squares were covered with bacteria.

How dirty is money? Money isn’t as dirty as I thought it would be. I thought there would be tons of little and big pieces of bacteria on the plates, but there were only a few pieces on each plate. There were three big pieces and the rest were small. The bacteria covered 210 squares total. (not including the control) The amount of squares of bacteria on the control is 4 squares. The average amount of squares of bacteria is 23.33.

In conclusion, money is dirty. When doing this experiment, I learned how to grow bacteria, and I learned that money is dirty, but it isn’t as dirty as I thought. My hypothesis was correct and incorrect, because I thought it was going to be extremely dirty, it wasn’t extremely dirty, but it was still dirty. Two possible errors, are I could’ve had plates that already had bacteria on them. Or I could of used really clean money. I could have improved this experiment by doing it more times with more dirty money.