151k views
2 votes
Snow began falling at noon on Sunday. The amount of snow on the eground at a certain location at time t was given by the function h(t)=11.60t−12.41t²2+6.20t³−1.58t⁴+0.20t⁵−0.01t⁶ where t is measured in days from the start of the snowfall and h(t) is the depth of snow in inches. Draw a graph of this function, and use your graph to answer the following questions. What happened shortly after noon on Tuesday?

1 Answer

5 votes

Final answer:

The question revolves around determining events on a snowy Tuesday based on a complex snowfall function. We need a graph to visualize the snow depth over time, particularly focusing on Tuesday. Since no graph can be drawn here, we can infer behavior using calculus to find the rate of change of snowfall at the relevant time.

Step-by-step explanation:

To determine what happened shortly after noon on Tuesday, we can use the provided snowfall function h(t)=11.60t−12.41t²⁄2+6.20t³−1.58t⁴+0.20t⁵−0.01t⁶, where t is the time in days from the start of the snowfall and h(t) represents the depth of snow in inches. However, without a graphing tool here, we cannot directly draw or visualize the graph of this function. Based on the equation, we could use a graphing calculator or software to plot the function and observe the snow depth pattern over the days, focusing especially on the period shortly after noon on Tuesday (which would correspond to t just over 2 days since Sunday noon).

With the given function, we can't directly provide the graph, but we can infer that by taking the derivative of h(t) and evaluating at t just over 2, we could find the rate of snowfall at that specific time. If the derivative were positive at t > 2, it would imply snow was still accumulating. If it were negative, it would imply snow was melting. If the value of the derivative were close to zero, it could indicate that the snowfall was slowing down or that there was a momentary hiatus in snow accumulation.

User Boxi
by
7.1k points