Thread: Maths.....

If THAT is supposed to be a temperature graph, your teacher should be sacked for failing to come up with decent examples that reflect reality. There is no way that temperature becomes a 2nd order function if the heating is turned off. It will be a function following the natural logarithm, dropping 'fast' and then petering out.

Making the temperature follow a squared function would be quite an interesting challenge and require active heating. The same goes for the heating cycle. And at the temp when the heater is turned back on, the temperature also follows a natural log function and be asymmetrical, meaning the temperature would start increasing rapidly, rather than slowly and then gaining momentum.

I understand that she used the heating question as a coathanger to shove the square function into for the purpose of learning to use square functions, but it really is horribly wrong at so many levels. Questions like this should be physically accurate to at least the very basic degree. Otherwise you'll confuse many people about the entire thing.

In this example, the shape of the curve is not only wrong because the curvature would be different, but it would also be asymmetrical. She could have taken another example that would have been accurately described with a square function, like a ball being kicked upwards or a cannon firing a ball.

Air friction would still make the function non-squared, but at least the 'ideal' situation (ignoring air friction) would result in a perfect squared function.