Frogs have been breeding like flies at the Enormous State University (ESU) campus! Each year, the pledge class of the Epsilon Delta fraternity is instructed to tag all the frogs residing on the ESU campus. Two years ago (t = 0) they managed to tag all 42,000 of them (with little Epsilon Delta Fraternity tags). This year's pledge class discovered that all the tags had all fallen off, and they wound up tagging a total of 54,600 frogs.
Function: 42000 (1.3^t/2)
Assuming exponential population growth, and that all this year's tags have fallen off, how many tags should Epsilon Delta order for next

Question

Frogs have been breeding like flies at the Enormous State University (ESU) campus! Each year, the pledge class of the Epsilon Delta fraternity is instructed to tag all the frogs residing on the ESU campus. Two years ago (t = 0) they managed to tag all 42,000 of them (with little Epsilon Delta Fraternity tags). This year's pledge class discovered that all the tags had all fallen off, and they wound up tagging a total of 54,600 frogs. 
Function: 42000 (1.3^t/2)
Assuming exponential population growth, and that all this year's tags have fallen off, how many tags should Epsilon Delta order for next

stacey · Answer

This year is year number 2, so t=2.
Next year will be year number 3, so t=3.

stacey · Answer

So Epsilon Delta should order 42000 (1.3^(3/2)) = 62,254 tags