It takes 30 days to fill a laboratory dish with bacteria. If the size of the bacteria doubles each day. How long did it take for the bacteria to fill one half of dish?
So, obviously 29 days.
It takes 30 days to fill a laboratory dish with bacteria. If the size of the bacteria doubles each day, how long did it take for the bacteria to fill one half of dish?
To determine how long it took for the bacteria to fill half of the dish, we need to think about the concept of exponential growth. Given that the size of the bacteria doubles each day, we can deduce that the dish will be filled completely on the 30th day.
If the dish is completely filled on the 30th day, that means that on the 29th day it was half full. Similarly, on the 28th day, it would have been one-fourth (1/2^2) full, and on the 27th day, it would have been one-eighth (1/2^3) full.
So, if we keep working backward, we can determine the time it took for the bacteria to fill half of the dish. We can express this mathematically as:
1/2 = 1/2^x, where x represents the number of days it took to fill half of the dish.
Rearranging the equation, we have:
2^x = 2
Since 2^1 equals 2, we can conclude that it took 1 day for the bacteria to fill half of the dish.