It started with a little “oink!” from a student when asked “Who was the former President of the United States?” by his teacher in class.
Appalled by this apparent display of rudeness, the teacher sent the student to stand outside the classroom.
Shocked and puzzled by his dismissal, the sad student cut a forlorn figure outside his classroom, and couldn’t hold back a sneeze at a passing group of giggly girls.
That group of giggly girls giggled at their exclusive naughty joke all the way to the tuckshop, where one of them sneezed while taking her bowl of fish ball noodles from the stall aunty, who in turn sneezed while disposing her stall’s leftovers at the rubbish dump, startling a passing kitten, who in turn let out a BIG KITTY SNEEZE later amidst all the “SOOOOO CUTE!!!” while being caressed by a large gathering of girls, since it was, after all, the school’s resident kitty.
After the dust had settled, the giggles turned into a series of oinks, the kitty spooked everyone with an oink, and students thought the stall aunty was selling bak chor mee.
When certain portions of the school assembly sounded like a pig farm as they sang the National Anthem the following morning, the school principal was sufficiently alarmed to hastily convene a staff meeting, where the Biology HOD stood up and said,
Sir, I have grave news.
Using my lab’s sophisticated equipment, we’ve concluded that the students and the cat have been infected by a new, highly-contagious O1NK strain of the influenza virus.
We believe the first student caught it via contact with Aussie pigs in his Australian Farmstay tour during the school holiday.
As per the H1N1 virus, steps are being taken to set up checkpoints at our school gate. Anyone found to reply “oink” when asked for his/her name will be turned away.
In addition, the following info was obtained from contact tracing:
The school has a total 1500 students. The spread of the virus, since the first student was discovered at Monday 5:00pm is given by
,
where y is the total number of students infected after t hours, and α is obtained by the solution of
- It’s now 16 hours since the first student first came to school. How many students are infected now (correct to the nearest whole student)?
- Given that announcements are scheduled at the beginning of every hour (e.g. 10:00am, 11:00am etc.), and that according to the Education Ministry’s guideline, the school principal will need to make an announcement to close the school at the hour in which the number of infected students is expected to cross the 45% mark. What time should the principal schedule his announcement?
Unfortunately, the school principal had returned all his math knowledge to his teacher (shame on you!). Hence in order to solve the above problem, he had to rely on his Mathematics HOD, who promptly stood up and said
… OINK!
As part of your AMaths Exponential & Logarithmic Functions chapter, you are almost certain to see in your O-Level exam a question (or part of a question) concerning the application of an exponential or logarithmic function on some scary-looking real-life situations that may involve the likes of a exploding/shrinking population, multiplying bacteria, decaying radioactive substances, cooling temperatures etc.
While the calculation part is usually pretty straightforward i.e. sub the relevant values into the given formula and use what’s stated in Sergeant Loi’s Logarithm Training Program and ln/lg both sides etc., it’s vital that you read the question carefully before submitting your final answer.
