For instance, it would be easy to remove the lilies during the first three weeks when almost all the water surface is clear. With exponential growth, if preventative action is required, you have to do it early, when the problem seems trivially small, and there doesn’t seem to be anything to worry about. It’s the same kind of growth you find with climate change, which is why scientists - who do understand exponential growth - are so worried about it. It’s what mathematicians call exponential growth. One more day and the lilies have taken over the entire pond. But the very next day, day 29, the lilies cover half the pond, and your time to act is up. Even after four weeks (28 days), 3/4 of the pond is still free of lilies. If you were swimming around in the pond, for the first three weeks it would be easy to avoid bumping into a lily. Because, in terms of the numbers, viruses grow and spread the same way as the lilies in the pond.įor a while it looks like the growth is slow, just 1 lily the first day, then 2 the next day, then just 4, and so on. Videos of people explaining this problem and the solution have been all over social (and mainstream) media in recent months, to help people understand how viruses grow and spread, as authorities around the world struggled to help people understand the potential danger of the growth of the novel coronavirus. The correct answer is 29 days! The day before the pond was completely full. (So, you could have cleared some of them out over a few days. After how many days was the pond exactly half full of lilies (which is probably when the alarm bells would have rung in your mind that you need to pull some out so you can continue to swim in the pond)? On day thirty, you find that the entire pond is covered in lilies, and you can no longer swim. So after one day there are two lilies, on day three there are four, then eight on the fourth day, and so on. The vendor says you can expect that kind of lily to grow by doubling every day. Imagine you have built a swimming pond in the garden, and for decoration you drop a newly acquired lily in the middle. Here is a simple math puzzle many people get wrong. When will the lilies cover half the water surface?
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