Welcome to the College Mathline Blog

This blog accompanies the College Mathline television program produced by Palomar College

Here you can post a question for us or a comment about the show. You can also find information on our "real world" applications of mathematics.

Monday, October 6, 2008

Math Questions Fall 2008

You can leave math questions for us here, as comments to this post, and we will (hopefully!) solve them on the broadcast each Wednesday.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi, i am in a calculus class and I have to find the tangent line for x^3+y^3=6xy at the point (4/3,8/3). I am not getting the answer in the book, can you help?

College Mathline said...

We did this one on the program last week (October 8). You can view the archived episode at http://www.collegemathline.com/ if you didn't catch it last week!

Anonymous said...

I'm in intermediate algebra and i have a problem. I'm suppose to factor this

2x^7+128x

please help!

Anonymous said...

hi, i am a student from cross's 110 college algebra class and i am having trouble sending an email so I was wondering if you can work through problems 4,5 and 6 on the take home portion part of the test. thank you

College Mathline said...

Ritzy, sorry the email didn't work.

#4: You are given the value of 10^20.3 for the energy released by an earthquake. You want to find the magnitude when the energy is 8 times the amount given. So you would simply plug (8*10^20.3) into the formula for E and calculate M. You might want to simplify the powers of 10 in the numerator and denominator before dealing with the log.

#5: We did the first two parts during the broadcast today. The remaining parts shouldn't be too bad once you have the right model equations. If you need additional details try the email again (or post a comment here).

#6: For parts a and b, you are given the value of intensity which you can use for "I" in the equation. You just have powers of 10 here, so you don't even need a calculator to compute the values. You should get 120 for part a for instance. For part c, form a ratio of your answers from the first two parts, part a on top and b below. This will give you the ratio of decibels.

Hope this helps!

Anonymous said...

A small garden measures 8ft by 10ft. A uniform border around the garden increases the total area to 143 sq ft. What is the width of the border?