Kate Cornman Blog Post #2
Part A:1. This graph on commodity-price indexes was taken from an article from the Economist on January 9th, 2014. The article describes the concerns whether the Chinese "super cycle" is running off and not improving its growth.
2. The relationship of a function is that there is exactly one output per input. A function also is determined by passing a Vertical Line Test.
4. The graph specifically shows how between 1845 to present day the overall trend of commody price indexes in industrials has decreased.
5. This is not a linear function.
6. The average rate of change is not consistent so it is not linear. For example at one point, (85-50)/ (1850-1840)=3.5 versus another R.O.C. on the graph which is (125-85) /1870-1860=4.
7. Since a mathematical model is supposed to help predict future events through an equation, this graph does not represent a mathematical model because it could not predict what will happen the next year.
Part B:
3 & 4.) This article is from the Economist describing job growth in poor countries by income group. This graph is NOT a function because there are multiple outputs with each input. The relationship in this graph is that the middle and working class are increasing as well as jobs in the countries represented on the graph.
kate,
ReplyDeleteso it kind of seems to me like your second example actually is a function. if countries are the input and level of income is the output, then for instance, asia has five categories for which this information is being represented. extremely poor, moderately poor, near poor, developing middle class, and middle class and above. if you took just the information for asia and made a separate graph with the number in each of these categories, then there would be five separate functions of income level relative to region. five separate regions are represented on this graph. if you separated each of them into it's own graph, there are five separate function relationships displayed for five separate regions. the way that the data is displayed, however, does make it appear that there are multiple outputs for one input. kind of tricky.
professor little