Complete 4 short Disc Posts

1:

You will meet 4 students who are attending ABC University. Your task is to determine who is the most likely to succeed at ABC University. In your post, do the following.

• Select the student you believe is most likely to be successful. Begin your post with a declaration “I believe that _______________________ is most likely to be successful.”
• Explain the barriers the student is facing. There may be multiple ones.
• Explain the behaviors the student is demonstrating, and how those behaviors either help the student succeed or are getting in the way of success.
• Conclude your post with why you feel that of the 4 students, the one you chose is most likely to succeed.

2:

Interview yourself—or, better yet, have someone interview you—using the same or similar questions Professor Rawlins used to interview his student on pp. 69-72 of The Writer’s Way. Write a 75 to 150-word process describing the interview. Identify at least three ideas for essays which came from your interview. What surprised you about this process?

3:

Week 5 Discussion

This week we’ve talked about polynomials and their properties. Polynomials show up in the real world a lot more than you would think! Applications can be found in physics, economics, meteorology, and more.

One real-world example of a degree-two polynomial is the projectile motion equation used in physics:

Details about this formula can be found at the brainfuse.com website.

For example, if you hit a baseball at shoulder height (say about , you may have an initial velocity of around. The force of gravity is about .

We can convert our miles to hour to feet per second (89.5 mph = 131.3 ft/s) and create an equation that would model the height of the ball at time t:

Pick a baseball team average speed off the bat from this list. Pretend you are on that team and hitting a pitch. Using your height and the information in the table, create your own personalized equation as was done in the example above.

Once you have your equation, find the zeros and the vertex using the techniques covered this week in Chapter 3. Show all your work!

Compare the maximum height of your classmate’s baseball to your own. Do you think the difference is more from the difference in initial height of the bat or in the speed of the pitch?

4:

Rational functions can show up in surprising places. For example, when you are finding the average, you are actually using a rational function!

Or in math speak,

Often when making an expensive purchase we look at the total cost and whether we are willing to pay it. Another way to consider this is to find the average cost per month to see if it is in your budget.

A common example would be when you renew the contract on your cell phone. Often we buy a new phone at the same time, and you can either pay it up front or have it added to your monthly bill.

If you pay for the device up front, you can use the following function to model the monthly cost, where m is the number of months you plan on owning the device.

Do some research to find the cost of a device you want to buy, and either your actual monthly bill or an advertised monthly bill. Using these numbers, give us the function you would use to model the monthly cost.

Based on the asymptotes, what would be the minimum monthly average cost for this phone and plan? Explain how you got your answer.

What would be the average cost if you replace the phone after 2 years (24 months)? Does this make you reconsider the price of the phones you buy?