All Calculus 1 Resources
Example Questions
Example Question #2681 : Functions
A cube is growing in size. What is the rate of growth of the cube's surface area if its sides have a length of 1 and a rate of growth of 40?
Begin by writing the equations for a cube's dimensions. Namely its surface area in terms of the length of its sides:
The rate of change of the surface area can be found by taking the derivative of each side of the equation with respect to time:
Now that we have a relationship between the surface area and the side parameters, we can use what we were told about the cube, in particular that its sides have a length of 1 and a rate of growth of 40:
Example Question #881 : Rate
Find the rate of change of from
To do rate of change , remember it is equivalent to finding slope.
Example Question #2683 : Functions
The position of a car is defined by the equation . What is the average velocity of the car between and ?
The average velocity of an object between and is given by the equation
In this problem,
Example Question #2682 : Functions
The position of a car is defined by the equation . What is the instantaneous velocity of the car at ?
The instantaneous velocity of the car is the first derivative of the position at a given point.
In this problem,
Example Question #3711 : Calculus
Find for .
To solve this problem, we can use either the quotient rule or the product rule. For this solution, we will use the product rule.
The product rule states that .
In this case, let and .
Putting both of these together, we get
.
Example Question #802 : How To Find Rate Of Change
Find the slope of the line tangent to the curve of the multivariable function f(x,y) at
the point .
1/2
-1/2
-1
1
None of the other answers
-1
To find the slope of the tangent line at the specified point, we must first verify that the specified point actually exists on the curve. We check that
Since the verification checks out, the problem has a solution and we can continue with Implicit Differentiation.
Recall that for Implicit differentiation, if we have a function in terms of y, we have that it's derivative with respect to x is
Applying this to the given function, we have that
We must also utilize the Chain Rule to obtain the derivative; we get that
Algebraically, we divide the cosine term to begin isolating dy/dx. We then get that
To obtain the slope of the tangent line, we substitute the specified point (x,y) for x and y respectively.
Example Question #802 : How To Find Rate Of Change
A balloon's radius is increasing at a rate of 5 cm/s at the exact moment when the radius of the balloon is 1 cm. Assuming that the balloon is a sphere, at what rate is the volume increasing?
The volume of a sphere is
which can also be written as a function with respect to time, i.e..
.
If we take the derivative of this, then
.
The problem tells us though that the rate of change of the radius is and .
Plugging in these values we find that
.
Example Question #3713 : Calculus
Suppose you are a banker and set up a very unique function for your interest rate over time given by
However, you find your computer incapable of calculating the interest rate at . Estimate the value of the interest rate at by using a linear approximation, using the slope of the function at .
Undefined
To do a linear approximation, we're going to create a function
, that approximates our situation. In our case, m will be the slope of the function at , while b will be the value of the function at . The z will be distance from our starting position to our end position , which is .
Firstly, we need to find the derivative of with respect to x to determine slope.
By the power rule:
The slope at will therefore be 0 since .
Since this is the case, the approximate value of our interest rate will be identical to the value of the original function at x=2, which is .
1 is our final answer.
Example Question #3714 : Calculus
Approximate the value at of the function ,with a linear approximation using the slope of the function at .
To do this, we must determine the slope of the function at , which we will call , and the initial value of the function at , which we will call , and since is only away from , our linear approximation will look like:
To determine slope, we take the derivative of the function with respect to x and find its value at , which in our case is:
At , our value for is
To determine , we need to determine the value of the original equation at
At , our value for b is
Since ,
Example Question #1 : How To Find Prediction Models
Determine the tangent line to at , and use the tangent line to approximate the value at .
First recall that
To find the tangent line of at , we first determine the slope of . To do so, we must find its derivative.
Recall that derivatives of exponential functions involving are given as:
, where is a constant and is any function of
In our case, ,.
At ,
, where is the slope of the tangent line.
To use point-slope form, we need to know the value of the original function at ,
Therefore,
At ,
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