Question

the average rate of disintegrations from a certain radioactive sample is known to be roughly 20 per minute. if you wanted to measure this rate within 4%, for approximately how long would you plan to count?

Answer 1

To measure the average rate of disintegrations within 4%, you would count for approximately 3.6 seconds.

Step-by-step explanation:

To measure the average rate of disintegrations within 4%, we can set up an equation using the known rate of disintegrations. Let's assume we want to measure the rate within 4%, so the range of acceptable rates would be between 20 - 0.04 * 20 and 20 + 0.04 * 20. This gives us a range of 19.2 to 20.8 disintegrations per minute. To find how long we would need to count, we divide the total range by the rate per minute: (20.8 - 19.2) / 20 = 0.06 minutes or approximately 3.6 seconds.