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Here's the situation:
Your spaceship has crashed on an
unknown planet. You and your crew encounter a drooling,
carnivorous alien monster. As you can guess, this is not good.
It gets worse. While you are cowering in a cave, trying not to
cry "mommy" in front of your crew, your science officer is able to
chart the monster's growth over several hours' time. She comes
back to you with her report (and minus one arm). The news is
grim... With
each hour that passes,
the monster doubles
in size (specifically, his height.) (She also said that the
monster's stomach was making those growly-hungry noises.)
If we assume that the monster is
1
foot tall at birth, what formula would describe the growth of
the monster?
Well, let's figure it out.
The best thing to do to figure out things like this is to make a
chart of data. You can usually find a pattern that will lead
to the formula!
We can even rewrite the first line
of the table like this so the pattern sticks:
At birth:
 |
 |
We can write
Using function notation, our
official formula is
Now, you can figure out the
monster's height at any time!
Continued on the
next
page
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