The Ultimate Sports Question

1
The Ultimate Sports Question

• GATORADE
• OR
• POWERADE

2
Introduction

• Athletes of all sizes compete every day in
  various sporting events. Ages range from young
  children to people nearing 100. Every athlete
  knows the importance of hydration, but over the
  past 30 years more emphasis has been placed on
  re-hydration. Now, every sport is sponsored by a
  different athletic drink. In our experiment, we
  decided to test whether Gatorade or Powerade was
  prefered.

3
Gatorade

• Gatorade was first created in 1965 for the
  University of Florida Gators football team. The
  original purpose was to keep the players hydrated
  during practices and games.

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Gatorade

• Gatorade states, Nothing rehydrates, replenishes
  and refuels better than Gatorade not even
  water.
• They also claim to stimulate thirst so athletes
  will drink more and stay better hydrated.

5
Powerade

• Powerade was made as a response to Pepsi buying
  Gatorade.
• Powerade claims to have a great tasting flavor
  that encourages athletes to drink more.

6
Gatorade vs. Powerade
7
Our Test

• Based on our experience as athletes, we think
  that Gatorade will be preferred by most athletes.
• We do not think that it will be a huge
  overwhelming decision.
• We think that around 60 of people will prefer
  Gatorade over Powerade.

8
Our Test

• To administer our test, we needed athletes, so we
  used all of the athletes that were present at
  Dartmouth Track and Field Practice on Friday,
  February, 13, 2004.
• We hoped to have 50 athletes for our test.
• Our test was double blind, with one pourer and
  one tester.

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Procedure

• We bought 3 quarts of both Gatorade Lemon-Lime
  and Powerade Lemon-Lime.
• We poured 110 cups, half with Gatorade and half
  with Powerade, keeping them separate, each with
  about the same amount of liquid.

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Procedure

• For each tester, we had one person, the pourer,
  place Powerade or Gatorade in the left or right
  hand of the transporter, noting their position on
  the data sheet.
• The transporter brought the cups to the front of
  the subject keeping them in the same hands.
• The cups were placed facing the subject, still in
  the same position.

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Procedure

• The transporter asked the questions to the
  subject while the tasted the liquid.
• Question One Which of these two drinks tastes
  better, Left, Right or No Preference?

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Procedure

• After the transporter recorded the answers to the
  first question, another question was asked.
• If you were replenishing your body after a
  workout, which drink would you choose Left or
  Right?
• The answer, left or right, was also brought back
  to the pourer and recorded.

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Procedure

• The transporter walked back to the pourer, who on
  the data sheet wrote down the preference of the
  subject.
• This data was then copied from the data sheet
  onto a spreadsheet in Excel.

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Null Hypothesis

• We decided that it would be equally likely that
  our subjects would prefer Gatorade or Powerade.
• This made our P(null) 0.5
• This is a normal distribution curve.

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Null Hypothesis
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Alternate Hypothesis
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Critical Value

• To calculate our critical value, we used the
  formula z( Pours Pnull )/v( pnull(1-pnull)/n)
  to find the z score and our null hypothesis.
• This gave us a value of 29.

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Power

• The power of our experiment with 48 people was
  31.
• Our experiment was not too powerful from the
  beginning, we did not realize this, otherwise we
  could have changed several things.

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Power Rethought

• We could have changed our alternate hypothesis.
• Had we selected 75 of people would choose
  Gatorade instead of 60, we would have had a
  Power of 96.

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Power Rethought

• We also could have added in more test subject.
• If we had increased the number of subjects from
  48 to 100 opinionated tasters, our Power would
  have also increased to approximately 54.

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Parameter

• As our test parameter, we decided that it would
  be equally likely for a subject to choose
  Gatorade or Powerade. This made our parameter 0.5.

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Test Statistic

• With data collected from N randomly sampled
  athletes and G being the number of athletes who
  prefer Gatorade to Powerade, our test statistic
  is PGN
• Under the Null hypothesis, G will be distributed
  through a binomial distribution with
• probability that pnull 0.5.

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Results

• After conducting our test, we compiled our
  results and found that
• 67 of our subjects like Gatorade.
• 32 out of 48 people prefered Gatorade to
  Powerade.
• 4 people were not opinionated tasters.

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Tester Preferences
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Results

• We had originally stated that we believe 60 of
  people would prefer Gatorade
• Our result of 67 is clearly higher than what we
  believed
• What does this mean?

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Conclusions

• Our power could have been higher to give our
  project a higher power, but as chance would have
  it our experiment still worked out.
• As previously mentioned 67 of our test subjects
  preferred Gatorade, but how do we know for some
  strange reason that Dartmouths Track and Field
  team does not have a bias to pick Gatorade. Had
  time and resources permitted we could have tested
  a more diverse population of athletes or a random
  group of non athletes who have no reason to
  prefer one or the other.

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Conclusions

• Also, we could include different sports drinks,
  like All-Sport, in our experiment to provide a
  more accurate depiction of what tastes better to
  athletes.

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Thanks

• www.gatorade.com
• www.powerade.com
• Dartmouth Track and Field Team
• Professors Leibon and Rudel