Exercises: 2.1. The population of a small city grows exponentially with a growth rate of 4.6% per year. Suppose the initial population of this city is 1,345,000 people. Complete the following table that predicts the population size every three years for the next 30 years.
Year | No. of People
1 | 1,345,000
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
18 |
19 |
20 |
21 |
22 |
23 |
24 |
25 |
26 |
27 |
28 |
29 |
30 |
2.2. The value of stock grows exponentially with a growth rate of 5.75%. Determine the value of an investment in this stock after 16 years.
2.3. The amount of money that stock market investment is worth grows exponentially with a growth rate of 22%. Construct a graph that shows the value of this stock each year for the next 10 years.
EXPONENTIAL DECAY
The exponentially growing quantities we investigated in the previous section grew quickly because they doubled in value over fixed time periods. The exponential decaying quantities investigated in this section decrease more slowly because they decay over fixed periods of time. For exponentially decaying quantities, these fixed periods of decay are called half-lives and are denoted as Thl. We have a mathematical equation for these exponentially decaying quantities that is very similar to our exponential growth formula above. As stated above, we use the symbol A and P instead of the phrases 'new value' and 'initial value' respectively, that are used in the textbook. We symbolize time with t and input values of t in the same units as the half-life. The present value, A, of an exponentially decaying quantity at time t is given as follows:
Formula for exponential decay:
A = P * (0.5)^(t/Thl)
The compound caffeine present in coffee and tea is known to have a half-life of about 5.42 hours (5 hours and 42 minutes) when ingested by humans. A typical cup of coffee has about 100 mg of caffeine. This means that if you drink a cup of coffee at 12:00 AM, you will still have 50 mg of caffeine in your body at 12:42 AM.