To help you read a burette, first obtain a 3″x5″ card and with a black felt tip pen make a horizontal mark on your card, one inch thick and practically the length of the card. When the top of the black band is held just below the bottom of the meniscus you will see a reflection of the band in the meniscus against the white of the card behind. This offers you a repeatable method of determining the position of the meniscus. You must make sure during your readings that your line of sight is perpendicular to the buret so as to avoid parallax due to the center of the meniscus being a greater distance from your eye than the scale against which you are reading it. If your line of sight is looking downward or looking upward, the meniscus will appear to be higher or lower, respectively, than its true value. It is extremely important that you learn how to read a buret with a repeatable precision of ±0.01 mL so as to eliminate this source of errors in all of the volumetric analyses that you perform.
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