Hi There!
Question: The population of bacteria in a petri dish triples every 8 hours. The population of the bacteria is initially 800 organisms. What unit is most appropriate for the time at which the population of the bacteria is 1200?
Answer: hour
Why: The reason I say its hour because thats the unit being used in the question when it states "every 8 HOURS".
Hope This Helps :)
The unit of minutes will be most appropriate here.
It is mainly because the growth is less that 800 itself, thus we can't express it in hours as smoothly as in minutes.
The difference in counts of bacteria = 1200 - 800 = 400
400 is half of initial size of population.
Since in 8 hour, the population grows 3 times, thus, assuming the scaling effect to be constant, we will have:
[tex]\text{8 hour implies 3 times growth = 3x}\\\text{60} \times \text{8 = 480 minutes implies 3 times growth = 3x}\\\text{480/6 = 80 minutes implies 3/6 times growth = 0.5 x}[/tex]
We took 80 minute size so as to imply the growth to be half of initial size x which is 0.5 x (as the resultant growth is 400, which is half of 800).
Thus, the population of bacteria will grow to 800 + 400 = 1200 in 80 minutes.
The unit of minutes is appropriate since it doesn't use decimal points or fraction which would've been used if we'd use the unit of time as hours (since 80 minutes = 1 + 1/3 hours.)
Learn more about fractions here:
https://brainly.com/question/1301963
