For your next assignment, you will be describing the outfitting of a laboratory, school, museum, or mobile setting for analyzing soils. Determine a purpose for your lab: you could use the lab for testing field soils for farmers, testing garden soils for homeowners, testing engineering properties of soils, setting up a “soil investigation lab” for schoolchildren, setting up a lab in a hands-on museum, or other purpose. What tests would you want to be able to do? What equipment would you need? You should describe at least three different soil testing procedures you would perform. The purpose of your lab should correspond to the tests you choose – for example, for grade school children you would not want to choose tests using dangerous chemicals. I want you to write this up as a short paper (somewhere between 3.5 and 5 typed pages). Describe the properties of soil you would want “your” soil lab to be able to test and what equipment would be necessary. Would your lab be primarily a “basic research” lab, or would you be more interested in doing applied work (like helping farmers know what amendments they need to add to their soil)? Include citations for information in the body of your paper. Again, the same format and requirements (in your own words, no more than 10% direct quoting, cite all your sources) As much as possible, try to estimate a budget for this lab set up. you can find price lists online. I would like the assignment to include an introduction, where you describe the purpose of your lab, a materials section where you describe the different tests (minimum of three) you would like to do, a description of how those tests are performed and how they fit in with the purpose of your lab, and an equipment section where you list what you would need, and a proposed budget. For the assignment, you may use your textbook, any other soils books, the World Wide Web (this will probably be helpful for the price lists), or you may talk to people involved with soil testing. You must cite your sources in the body of the paper and prepare a literature cited section (e.g., give Web addresses or give the title, author, year published, etc. for a book). There need to be citations other than just for the price lists. You may use sites like http://www.lamotte.com/ (the home of our soil-test kit), http://www.ascscientific.com/ams.html (AMS soil samplers), Ben Meadows, Forestry Suppliers, etc. You may also use sites like the Fish and Wildlife service, Globe Project, school or university websites. You MAY NOT use generalized encyclopedia sites like Wikipedia (which you should NEVER use for research papers; it is too general and contains many factual errors). As always, I will spot check papers and plagiarizers will receive a 0 for the assignment.