SOLUTION: Please help me solve this problem on Non-linear Functions.- The amount of medicine left in a person's body after ingesting it is represented in the table below: Hours / Amount

Question 156723: Please help me solve this problem on Non-linear Functions.- The amount of medicine left in a person's body after ingesting it is represented in the table below:
Hours / Amount of Medicine (mg)
0 / 100(mg)
1 / 50(mg)
2 / 25(mg)
3 / 12.5(mg)
4 / 3.125(mg)
5 / 1.5625(mg) 1.How do you calculate the amount of medicine left in the body according to the pattern in table?
Answer by Earlsdon(6294) (Show Source): You can put this solution on YOUR website!
If you look at the given data as ordered pairs (x, y), you can plot these on a graph and begin to see some kind of relationship between the elapsed hours (the indepedent variable, x) and the amount of medicine remaining (the dependent variable, y).
You'll notice that for each hour that elapses, the amount of medicine remaining is half the previous amount. This suggests a decaying exponential function that might look like this:

Let's try a few values of the independent variable (hours elapsed, x) and see if we get the corresponding amount of medicine left as shown by the table of data.
Starting with x = 0:

Good!
x = 1:

Good!
x = 2:

Good!
x = 3:

Good!
x = 4:

Now this does not follow the previous pattern, so I would question whether or not the table has all of the data.
x = 5:

This is the result shown for x (elapsed hours) = 4 .
Could you perhaps have copied the data wrongly?
Let's look at the curve:

Take a look at your original data to see if you have skipped an entry.
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