Asked by Pek

Find the final hourly wage if a $11.50 starting wage is increased by 2.5% each year for 8 years. Half the raise is given every 6 months.
Answered by Ms. Sue
Enough! What questions do you have about these posts?

Please do not post any more questions until you've posted YOUR thinking about these problems!
Answered by Pek
My question is how do I know which formula to use.
Answered by Reiny
I see the same formula applying to each of your 5 problems, looks like exponential growth in each case.
Which formula have you learned?
Answered by Pek
My teacher briefly mentioned exponential growth, exponential decay, comping interest, and exponential growth/decay continuous.
Answered by Reiny
"comping interest" ? Looks like you have to pay a bit more attention.
I am sure your teacher more than briefly mentioned this.
This is a major topic and often takes up weeks of a course.

The main formula is
amount = initialvalue (base)^time
It can be adjusted to population growth, money growth, bacteria growth,
growth of frogs in a pond, etc

for this particular problem
amount = 11.5(1.0125)^16
= ...

can you see how I fit your data into the general growth formula ?
Answered by Pek
Thanks very much for your help - and the correction (mistakes happen, especially typos), but I'm sure when I say it was a brief mention since it's an algebra class doing pre-calc.
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