how could you determine whether a clear solution in a beaker is saturated sugar water or just water?

Answer 1

drink it

Answer 2

Very simple and a number of ways.

1. Just taste it. If it is sugar water, it will be sweet to taste. On the basic level, one of the ways of identifying substances is the use of all your senses, taste being one of them, as long as it is not hazardous; which is true in this case.

2. Simple evaporation. You can evaporate a numbers of drops of the solution and just let it air dry or facilitate the evaporation using heat. Eventually, you should see sugar crystals. You can confirm the presence of minute crystals by using a low power microscope.

3. Use of a densitometer. A sugar solution will be denser than just pure water. The solution that reads off with a greater value is the sugar solution.

4. Etc. using other sophisticated instruments, but the above techniques should suffice.

Answer 3

you could filter it through filter paper
if the molecules of the solute are too small they wont filter out, then you can distill the water(heat it up and vapourize it and the sugar will stay at the bottom as the residue, then you can condense the water back into another beaker.
or if you really dont want to do any of that, you can take ur chances and drink it.

Answer 4

a taste test always seems to work in differentiating sweetened water from regular tap.

Answer 5

Benedict's Test
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benedict's_reagent
http://jchemed.chem.wisc.edu/jcesoft/CCA/CCA5/MAIN/1ORGANIC/ORG18/TRAM18/B/MENU.HTM
http://www.biosci.ohiou.edu/introbioslab/Bios170/170_2/benedict.htm