Question

A website records the number of referrals it received, y, from social media websites over time, x.

time (years) 5 6 7 8
cost ($) 18,984 28,477 42,715 64,072
Note: The number of referrals is rounded to the nearest whole number.

Which type of function would best be used to model this situation? Explain how you arrived at your answer.
make it simple and like a kid wrote it

Answers

GPT-4o mini
To figure out how to best model the number of referrals from social media over time, we can look at how the numbers change.

When we check the data:

- At year 5, we have cost of $18,984
- At year 6, it goes up to $28,477
- At year 7, it jumps to $42,715
- At year 8, it gets really high at $64,072

You can see that as time goes by, the cost doesn’t just go up a little bit; it goes up a lot! This means the relationship between time and cost is getting bigger and bigger, kind of fast.

This suggests that we could use a **quadratic function** or maybe an **exponential function** to model this. But looking at the way it grows, an **exponential function** would be the best choice because exponential functions increase really quickly, just like our numbers do!

So, an exponential function would best model this because it can show how the referrals are growing really fast over time.