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Analyzing relationships between variables

Rava is studying an electric car. She finds out that the more she charges the car, the further it can go. The relationship is simple and direct: more charging time equals more distance. This helps her predict the car's range based on how long it's been charged. Created by Sal Khan.

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Video transcript

- [Narrator] We're told Rava is researching an electric car. She finds this graph, which shows how much range, measured in kilometers, the car gains based on charging time. All right, and they say, first, fill in the missing values in the table below. And if you are so inspired, pause this video, and see if you can have a go at that as well. All right, well they give us a few points, and I'm assuming these are points on a line. And we can see when the charging time is 15 minutes, the range is 180. So we could see when the charging time is 15 minutes, the range is 180. We can see when the charging time is 30 minutes, the range is 360 kilometers, so I could write that there. And then we see when the charging time is 45 minutes, the range is 540 kilometers. So that's all nice. But then they give us a few other points here. They say what happens when we are at T equals 10, or T equals one, which aren't easy to pick out here? But this is where it might be useful, if we assume that this is a line, what is the relationship between these? So let's see, to go from 15 to 180, it looks like you're multiplying by 12. To go from 30 to 360, it looks like we're multiplying by 12. To go from 45 to 540, it looks like we are multiplying by 12. So assuming K is just going to be 12 times T, we know that when T equals one, K is 12, and when T equals 10, 10 times 12 is 120. All right, now the second part, they say write an equation Rava can use to find out how much charging time, T, it takes to gain any number of kilometers in range, K. All right, well we already established a relationship. We said that K is equal to 12 times whatever T is. That's what we just established in this table up here, but that's not what they want. They wanna find out how much charging time, T, it takes to gain any number of kilometers in range, K. So what we need to do here is solve for T. So let's divide both sides by 12 to just have a T by itself on the right-hand side. And we are going to be left with T is equal to K over 12. T is equal to K over 12 and notice, you could put any number of kilometers of range in here and you're essentially just going to divide it by 12, and that will give you how much charging time. And I guess this would assume an infinitely large battery, which we know doesn't exist. But for the sake of this problem, here we have it. Here is the equation Rava can use.