You Perform an Experiment in Which You Take 16 Pots

You perform an experiment in which you take 16 pots of strawberry plants and give half of them 1 gram of ammonium nitrate per liter of water and the other half receive only water. Each group is then split in half again, and exposed to either 8 or 16 hours of light each day. You monitor the height of the plants for 4 weeks. You observe that plants grown in ammonium nitrate and 16 hours of light grow taller than no ammonium nitrate and 8 hours of light.
-In this experiment,the size of the pot is

A) an independent variable.
B) a dependent variable.
C) a standardized variable.
D) a placebo.
E) a control.