First, I should say I never have done any spectroscopies and I am just reading about it.
As far as I know, UV-Vis spectrophotometer has 2 beam samples: sample and reference. The sample has very diluted test material in a solvent and the reference is only the solvent.
I was reading a book about some experimental values for UV-Vis spectrophotometry and I noticed this page. My question is about that sentence saying "The data were obtained .. against water reference" . As the reference is the solvent alone, does it mean the samples are dilute solutions in water ? if so, how they solved benzene in water?
Here is a snapshot of the text: