Welcome to Mrs. Young's calculus class blog! Each week, I will start a new post. Students, you can write questions for me or chat with each other about how to solve a particular problem. As part of your class participation grade each week, every student must comment at least once to my post or another student's comment. I look forward to spending this year with you. Enjoy!

Sunday, November 11, 2012

November 12th - 16th

This week we will apply the first derivative test to real world problems. This is helpful when we want to find out when something is going to be at a maximum point or minimum point. One area where this would be useful in real life is economics. For instance, if we want to find out how many products we must sell in order to maximize our profit, then we could apply the first derivative test to our profit equation. For your post this week, I'd like you to tell me another area in real life, besides economics, where it would be helpful to apply the first derivative test to find max.'s or min.'s.

P.S. You will have a quiz over sections 4.1 - 4.3 on Thursday.

13 comments:

  1. If you want to find out in which year population will be the greatest in a given area, you could apply the first derivative test to your population equation.

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  2. You can use the first derivative test to find the sales level that yields a maximum profit for a company.

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    Replies
    1. Bonnie, can you think of another example besides maximizing profit? That is the example that I had in the first post.

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    2. Then… how about car accident rate? You can use the first derivative test to find what time is maximum or minimum.

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  3. If you want to find the point at which you reach your maximum speed during a trip you could apply the first derivative test to your position equation and then take the absolute value.

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  4. you can use the first derivative test to find out how to use the minimum amount of plastic for a water bottle to conserve plastic.

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  5. you can use the first derivative test to find out how many humburgers Mcdonalds sells in a year.

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  6. The first derivative test can be used to find the dimensions of a cardboard food container while using a limited amount of material

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  7. The first derivative test can be used when finding the maximum area and dimensions of an enclosed space while only given a certain amount of material for the perimeter.

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  8. You can use the first derivative test to find the maximum amount of area you can use for a chicken coop and how many chickens you can fit into that chicken coop.

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  9. Another area where knowing the max’s or min’s would be helpful would be in engineering/architecture. If you only have a limited supply of materials, you could find what you could do to maximize the volume. Or if you wanted to find when a water pump pumps out the water most efficiently (water pumped vs electricity consumption). Using the first derivative test to find the max or min, engineers can create the best designs while not wasting unnecessary materials.

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  10. You can use the first derivative test to find the minimum amount of wood you need to make a bird house.

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  11. You cnn use the first derivative test to find the maxium about of sales that a mall will make in a year.

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