negative result when a negative result is expected, and a positive result when a positive result is expected. Negative Where there are only two possible outcomes, e.g. positive or negative, if the treatment group and the negative control both produce a negative result, it can be inferred that the treatment had no effect. If the treatment group and the negative control both produce a positive result, it can be inferred that a confounding variable is involved in the phenomenon under study, and the positive results are not solely due to the treatment. In other examples, outcomes might be measured as lengths, times, percentages, and so forth. In the drug testing example, we could measure the percentage of patients cured. In this case, the treatment is inferred to have no effect when the treatment group and the negative control produce the same results. Some improvement is expected in the placebo group due to the placebo effect, and this result sets the baseline upon which the treatment must improve upon. Even if the treatment group shows improvement, it needs to be compared to the placebo group. If the groups show the same effect, then the treatment was not responsible for the improvement (because the same number of patients were cured in the absence of the treatment). The treatment is only effective if the treatment group shows more improvement than the placebo group. Positive Positive controls are often used to assess test validity. For example, to assess a new test's ability to detect a disease (its sensitivity), then we can compare it against a different test that is already known to work. The well-established test is a positive control since we already know that the answer to the question (whether the test works) is yes. Similarly, in an enzyme assay to measure the amount of an enzyme in a set of extracts, a positive control would be an assay containing a known quantity of the purified enzyme (while a negative control would contain no enzyme). The positive control should give a large amount of enzyme activity, while the negative control should give very low to no activity. If the positive control does not produce the expected result, there may be something wrong with the experimental procedure, and the experiment is repeated. For difficult or complicated experiments, the result from the positive control can also help in comparison to previous experimental results. For example,