 Dilutions are important for your lab experience and because of this we're going to be doing a series of labs involving learning how to make dilutions of solutions. So what is a dilution? Basically a dilution involves making a specific concentration of a particular solution by adding the correct amount of solute to a solvent. Now most of the times where you will be working with water because water is considered a universal solvent that means that it is one of those chemicals that dissolve many different solutes. Solutes could be solids, they could be liquids and if you're working in a cell culture lab they could also be cells. So basically you're trying to find the right concentration of a particular solute so you add that to a particular solvent to give you the required concentration of a solution. So there are different types of dilutions that you'll be going through. You'll be exploring in your lab protocol. The first one that we're going to be talking about is a simple dilution. How do we make a simple dilution? So basically when we're making up simple dilutions we're using the specific volume of a liquid and you're combining that with the right amount of solvent and that will give you a desired concentration. So practical example in terms of you using dilutions in the household for example. If you were to make lemonade and you added too much sugar to your lemonade you want to make it a desired concentration so that it doesn't have too much sugar. One way of doing this is to make up a dilution. You can dilute your lemonade by adding more water to it so that your resulting solution will be more dilute and as a result you have less sweetness.