Basic Calculus
Performance Task
Situation
You are with a group of mathematicians and you are given a puzzling scenario:
A mountain climber wants to climb up a mountain that is 1 000 meters high. In the first hour,
he climbed half the height of the mountain. In the second hour, he climbed half the distance
he climbed in the first hour. In the third hour, he climbed half the distance he climbed in the
second hour.
You are tasked to determine whether the mountain climber will eventually be able to reach
the peak of the mountain or not. If so, determine how many hours will he need to reach the
peak. If not, you must explain
Problem
1. Will the mountain climber eventually reach the peak of the mountain?
2. How many hours will it take, if he does so?
Problem 1:
With the given situation above, we can create this table:
Hour(s) Distance reached (m) Total Distance Reached (m)
1 500 500
2 250 750
3 125 875
In the situation mentioned we can represent the problem into a geometric series, wherein in
each hour the distance reached decreases by half. We can express it into:
Total height reached = 500 +250+ 125 + …
Using the infinite geometric series formula, we can check if the mountain climber can reach
the 1 000 meters high mountain.
Wherein a is the first term, a = 500
a
S=
1−r 1
and r is the common ratio, r =
2
If we solve and substitute the given values,
500 500
a
S= = 1 = 1 =
1−r 1−
So theoretically, we can say that the mountain2 climber
2 will eventually reach the thousand
meters high mountain.
Problem 2:
Let us see how many hours will it take for the climber to reach the peak of the mountain.
Hour(s) Distance reached (m) Total Distance Reached (m)
1 500 500
2 250 750
3 125 875
4 62.5 937.5
5 31.25 968.75
6 15.625 984.375
7 7.8125 992.1875
8 3.90625 996.09375
9 1.953125 998.04688
10 0.97625 999.023125
11 0.48828125 999.511406
12 0.24414062 999.75555
13 0.12207031 999.87762
14 0.0610352 999.9387
15 0.03051758 999.96917
16 0.01525879 999.9844
… … …
Theoretically, we can say that the climber will reach the peak of the mountain, but as hours
pass the remaining distance becomes infinitely small thus never actually reaching it in finite
time.
We can also check the total distance reached through this formula:
∞
1000
S=∑ n
n=1 2
Distance reached: ∞
1000
∞
1000
S=∑ n
=∑ 50 =4.440892099 x 10−1 2
n=1 2 n=1 2
Total Distance reached: ∞
1000
50
1000
S=∑ n
=∑ 50 =999. 9999999999991 meters
n=1 2 n=1 2
Here we can see that even though the total distance is very close to 1,000 meters, representing
how the climbers distance approaches the peak but never really reaching it. Thus, we can say
theoretically that the climber will reach the peak, but we can’t precisely say how many hours
it will take the climber to reach the peak, since it will take an infinite amount of time.
Explanation gi unsa siya pagka relate sa limits, kamo na ani huhu