Lung Capacity

Do Females or Males Have Greater Lung Capacity?

Having good lung capacity is extremely important for any athlete and a regular person. Having a good lung capacity improves health and helps people live longer. Knowing how crucial having good lung capacity is, I thought it would be a great science experiment to investigate which gender(females or males) has greater lung capacity. My hypothesis is that boys will have greater lung capacity. I am a runner and participate in many races and when they announce the top finishers the male times are usually faster than females. With that being said you need very good lungs to be a good runner. So considering that boys times are usually faster I think boys will have greater lung capacity.

To do my experiment I needed ten volunteers five females, and five males. I needed all of my volunteers to play at least one sport, be the same age, and around the same height. To measure the volunteer's lung capacity I used a spirometer. Each volunteer had to breath into the spirometer three times, I would find an average for every volunteer's test. After I repeated that procedure on all ten volunteers. I found a total average for the females and males.

After comparing averages I found that males had a higher number. The average for females was 1706 ml. The males average was 2003 ml. The male had a greater average of 297 ml.

In conclusion, the males had a higher average which meant they had better lung capacity over females. Although the difference wasn’t massive 15% is definitely a significant enough change to declare that there was a difference. My hypothesis for this experiment was correct because I thought that males would have the greater lung capacity which they did. I learned a lot from this experiment and the importance of taking care of your lungs. I could improve my experiment in the future by testing a different age group of people and asking more volunteers to participate.