Question

Having difficulty graphing...
When rabbits were first brought to Australia, they increased rapidly in numbers. Assume that in 1861, there were 38 rabbits, and in 1863 there were 1500 rabbits, in 1864 there were 9487 rabbits, and in 1865 there were 60,000 rabbits.

Use 61 for 1861, 63, for 1863, etc., or your calculator will give you an error.

Make a scatter plot of this data. In 1870, according to your model, how many rabbits would there be?

Answer 1

a) 27,357,822

b) 7,293,462,308

c) 973,724

d) 595,334,768

Answer 2

@jim_thompson5910 Please help!

Answer 3

sry not quite sure on this one

Answer 4

@chantz417 It's alright! I was able to graph it but I do not know how to find 1870!

Answer 5

@lshiny give me a minute I think I can help.

Answer 6

@GLKK Okay, thank you!

Answer 7

@lshiny could you show me your graph?

Answer 8

I don't know how I am able to show you :( I'm sorry. I just punched the options in my graphing calculator.

Answer 9

@lshiny alright. give me a minute.

Answer 10

I would go with C. Seems the most reasonable. I could be wrong though.

Answer 11

@lshiny

Answer 12

i was thinking A

Answer 13

because in one year it went up 49,000 and there is 7 years ahead that you need to find

Answer 14

This problem is just really unrealistic. It assumes exponential growth which accelerates very very quickly. It doesn't take into account any other factors like predators or lack of food to slow the population growth rate down.

Answer 15

@jim_thompson5910 agreed. I also misread. I think C or A would be your best answers. @lshiny

Answer 16

yes @jim_thompson5910

Answer 17

Anyways, what you do is plot all of the points on a scatter plot like this

Answer 18

I agree completely. I am leaning towards C due to the fact that the past year gaps didn't have such a dramatic growth...

Answer 19

@jim_thompson5910 What do you think?

Answer 20

@lshiny I would go for C.

Answer 21

^ Yeah I'm learning towards C too! Thanks @GLKK for helping!

Answer 22

then you use exponential regression on a calculator to get this exponential function

y = (6.39967*10^(-48)) * 6.303060573^x

and then you plug in x = 70 to get


y = (6.39967*10^(-48)) * 6.303060573^x

y = (6.39967*10^(-48)) * 6.303060573^70

y = 595,334,749.644288

due to rounding errors, it's going to be a bit off of what they want, which is 595,334,768

Answer 23

so you can see why this model is ridiculous, especially in a very brutal environment such as Australia

Answer 24

Whoa, @jim_thompson5910
That was completely correct. I totally forget that this is possible through exponential regression. Thank you so much!

Answer 25

this is what geogebra gives me, which is the most accurate tool I could find so far

that red curve does its best job to get as close as possible to each point

then I computed f(70) to be 595,334,768.3