Learning Resources
Overview
Many natural phenomena exhibit patterns and similarities as you have seen in earlier courses and units of work. The ideas associated with growth and decay show a special pattern that can be modeled by using exponents and their inverses - this gives rise to exponential functions and their inverses, logarithmic functions.
A good clear understanding of these functions and their graphs is necessary to analyze the real-world situations which they model.
In this unit, the emphasis will be on
- Determining equations of exponential functions to model real situations
- Graphing exponential functions and solving exponential equations
- Evaluating and simplifying expressions involving powers
- Solving exponential equations by applying patterns discovered in logarithms.
Of course, the exponents will not only be integral but in essence any real number for many situations. Finally the solving of exponential equations (i.e. where the exponent is a variable) and logarithmic equations will be necessary to solve many problems.
You should take approximately 30 hours to complete this unit.