One way radical functions are used in the real world can be seen in an equation, relating the number of Earth days in a planet’s year to the average distance between the planet and the sun.
This equation uses metric units and is given by the following formula.
Here, D represents the number of Earth days, and x represents the average distance between a planet and the sun, in millions of kilometers.
As an astronomer, being able to graph this radical function can help your understanding of how the planets in the solar system behave.
We can use radical equations to model the growth of a certain population of creatures.
An equation for population growth can be given by the following equation.
Here, P represents the number of creatures in the population, and x represents the time, in years, after a specific period in time.
The 20 helps determine the growth of the population and the 50 represents the initial size of the population.
As a biologist, you may be interested in graphing this equation to predict the size of a population at some later time.