Question

Yesterday, there were q variants of a strain of bacteria. Today there are q^2 variants of the bacteria. There are 900 variants today. How many variants were present yesterday?

Answer 1

900 = q^2, so q = 30, so yesterday there were 30 variants

Answer 2

30

Explanation:

Since there are 900 today, and the variants square each day, we can take the square root of 900.

`√(900) =30`