A culture of a certain bacteria doubles every hour. At 9:00 a.m., there were already 120 bacteria. Which equation represents the number, n, at 8:00 a.m? How many bacteria were there?
To represent the number of bacteria at 8:00 a.m., we need to determine how many times the culture doubled between 9:00 a.m. and 8:00 a.m. There are a total of 9 hours between these two times.
Since the culture of bacteria doubles every hour, we can represent the number of bacteria at 8:00 a.m. as follows:
120/2^9 = n
Simplifying the equation:
120/512 = n
So, n ≈ 0.234, which means there were approximately 0.234 bacteria at 8:00 a.m.
However, since bacteria cannot exist in fractional amounts, we can conclude that there were no bacteria at 8:00 a.m. or that there was a very small fraction of a bacteria that rounded down to zero.