How is a control group and a manipulated variable similar? - Answers

They're both parts of an experiment.You conduct an experiment to find something out. Let's say you want to know if little kids like strawberries in their ice cream, and you know that little kids like ice cream. The presence of strawberries would be your manipulated variable. To test it, you would get two groups of kids - a control group that got normal ice cream (no strawberries, variable = 0 = false) and a group with ice cream that had strawberries (variable = 1 = true). You need the control group to help make sure nothing weird happened. For example, let's say you just happened to get a group of kids that hated ice cream. If you didn't have a control group, you would assume that no, kids don't like strawberries in their ice cream because none of them ate the ice cream when in fact it is the ice cream itself that they don't like, which you wouldn't've known without the control group.