Question
If an initial population of bacteria doubles every hour, what is the growth factor of this exponential model?
Ask by Murphy Bright. in South Africa
Dec 26,2024
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Tutor-Verified Answer
Answer
The growth factor is 2.
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The Deep Dive
In this scenario, the growth factor is 2. This means that for every hour that passes, the bacteria population doubles, leading to a consistent multiplicative increase. You can think of it as if each bacterium is throwing a little party for its clones every hour!
After each doubling, you can easily calculate the population for any given hour by using the formula
, where
is the initial population and
is the time in hours. If you start with 100 bacteria, after 3 hours, you’d have 800! Math can be fun, especially when it involves bacterial parties!