Question

Do you think this graph looks more like a quadratic or exponential function? Why do you think so?

Answer 1

Exponential Function

Explanation:

The y-axis represents the number of Bacteria and x-axis represents the number of hours. If you observe closely you will see that the number of bacteria are doubling after each hour. For example, at time = 4 hours the number of Bacteria were about 50, at time = 5 hours the number of Bacteria were about 100 and at time = 6 hours the number of Bacteria increased to about 200.

This type of behavior is a property of exponential functions where we see a multiplicative rate of change in the values i.e. each value is a multiple of previous value. A rough model for this function would be:

`f(x)=f(0)(2)^(x)`

Where, f(0) represents the number of bacteria at time = 0 hours i.e. number of Bacteria initially present and "x" represents the number of hours.