This task gives students an opportunity to work with exponential functions in a real world context involving continuously compounded interest. They will study how the base of the exponential function impacts its growth rate and use logarithms to solve exponential equations.

This lesson unit is intended to help teachers assess how well students are able to interpret exponential and linear functions and in particular to identify and help students who have the following difficulties: translating between descriptive, algebraic and tabular data, and graphical representation of the functions; recognizing how, and why, a quantity changes per unit intervale; and to achieve these goals students work on simple and compound interest problems.

This lesson unit is intended to help teachers assess how well students are able to: articulate verbally the relationships between variables arising in everyday contexts; translate between everyday situations and sketch graphs of relationships between variables; interpret algebraic functions in terms of the contexts in which they arise; and reflect on the domains of everyday functions and in particular whether they should be discrete or continuous.

This lesson focuses on students making decisions about what tools to apply to solve different problems related to quadratic expressions and equations. It is also intended to build awareness of the form an answer will take in order to help students make sense of the kind of problem they are solving. (9th/10th/11th Grade Math)

The purpose of this task is to give students an opportunity to explore various aspects of exponential models (e.g., distinguishing between constant absolute growth and constant relative growth, solving equations using logarithms, applying compound interest formulas) in the context of a real world problem with ties to developing financial literacy skills.