Aaron Xu and Christopher Storm Ms.Sanger Period 1 Bacterial Growth Bacterial growth is a good example of exponential growth. Bacteria are everywhere, inhabiting the surfaces of almost all tangible things. Here’s a quote from http://microbemagic.ucc.ie/about_microbes/“There are both harmful and helpful bacteria, some of which clean us and some of which kill us” Knowing about their ability to grow and divide has proven useful to us, as we can try to contain harmful bacteria, or figure out how fast it’ll spread. Bacteria have been on earth since ancient times, and clearly one of the main reasons they are so resilient when it comes to survival is because of their exponential growth. The reason why their growth is exponential in the first place is because they divide after growing. After becoming big enough, bacteria will divide in two, creating a new bacteria. Because of this process, 1 …show more content…
Bacteria double, which is why we have a base of 2, and they do it over different time intervals, which is why we have r. E coli., bacteria we will be looking at divides every 17 minutes. The y intercept would be (0,1), when there’s just one initial bacteria. There’s no x intercept because there isn’t a time when there’s no bacteria. The horizontal asymptote is 1, because as x approaches 0, y is approaching 1. Domain of the equation is all reals greater than or equal to 0, because the unit for the x axis is time. The range is all integers greater than or equal to 1, because there can only be whole bacteria. The end behavior of the function is as x approaches positive infinity, f(x) approaches positive infinity. As x approaches 0, f(x) approaches and touches 1. The reason for this is because time could go on forever, and bacteria can keep growing until a certain point; however, we do not know this point so we use infinity to represent it. Also time cannot be negative, and there can’t be less than one bacteria at any