MAT136 – Integral Calculus - Winter 2025 Written Assignment

MAT136 Assignment 6 (Written Component)

Due Saturday, 8 March 2025, at 9pm
Submitting the Assignment

Due date: Saturday, 8 March 2025, at 9pm.

Where to submit: On Crowdmark. Check your email for an invitation to Crowdmark.
What to do: Write solutions to the problems on blank or lined sheets of paper, or write them digitally. Start each
question on a new page. Then photograph, scan, or export a PDF of your solutions. See the Written Assignments
page on Quercus for details.
Uploading: Click on the link in the email from Crowdmark to submit your solutions. Plan on giving yourself some
extra time to upload your solutions the first time.

More details

1. Deadline: The deadline to submit this assignment is strict, to the second. Assignments that are even a few seconds
late will normally receive a grade of 0. Technical issues are not a valid reason to be late, so you are taking a risk if you
leave uploading your solutions to the last minute. Please give yourself lots of time to upload your assignment!

2. Purpose and feedback: The purpose of the written assignments is to give you some practice in thinking about and
writing solutions to mathematical problems, without any time pressure. You will receive feedback on your writing and
on your solutions. You are encouraged to take this opportunity to carefully write your solutions and think about how
to best present your reasoning behind them.

3. Writing solutions: Explain all your work, show your steps as well as your reasoning. You should write in words what
you are doing and why. The person reading your solution should easily be able to understand what you have done,
because you explained it, in words. Submissions with little or no written explanations will not receive full marks.

4. Uploading: A handwritten assignment can be photographed or scanned. It is important that the images (the scans
or photos) are clear and easy to read (not too dark, too bright, too blurry, etc.). Your submitted files are what will be
marked, so if the grader(s) can’t read them or can’t make sense of what you’ve written, you will not get full marks.

You may also write your solutions on a tablet, or type your solutions (LaTeX only please) as long as your solutions are
clear, easy to read and follow, and are all your own work.

Make sure you upload solutions to each problem to the correct place. If you upload solutions to the wrong problems,
or upload all your solutions to the same problem, it may result in getting 0 on all problems uploaded to the wrong places.

5. Grading: The assignment is out of 10 marks, with the marks for each question indicated beside it. Marks for each
solution will depend on your answer, as well as the quality of your explanation of those answers.

6. Academic Integrity: The solutions that you submit to this assignment must be all your own work. By submitting this
assignment you declare that:

(a) Your solutions are all your own work, explained in your own words.
(b) You have not copied any part of the assignment solutions from anyone or anywhere.
(c) You have not let anyone else copy any part of your solutions to the assignment.
(d) You have not used Generative AI (e.g., ChatGPT) for any part of the assignment.

1
MAT136 – Integral Calculus - Winter 2025 Written Assignment

Background

Since the events of Assignment 3, the astronomy students (with the help of some engineers) at St. George have been able
to establish intermittent communication with what they now know is a spaceship hovering in the sky over the McLennan
Physical Laboratories.

The students are obviously a bit concerned after the message they heard last time, apparently a threat to kill all humans, so
they try to communicate with the aliens to learn more about their culture and history.

Problems

The students are able to piece together some details about an important event on the alien home planet of Karhide.

In the present day, 500 million of the aliens live on Karhide. However, the population has been exponentially decaying for a
long time, ever since a devastating asteroid impact caused a significant change in Karhide’s climate.

Students learn that at the time of the impact, the population of Karhide was twice what it is now, and that a million aliens died
in the first 10 years after impact.

1. (1 point) To the nearest year, how long ago was the asteroid impact?

Be sure to organize your solution well, and clearly explain how you got your answer.

Since the alien population halved since the impact on Karhide, an untactful astronomy students calls the answer to the
previous problem the “half-life” of the alien population in a message to the ship. The other students are worried the aliens might
be offended by being compared to a population of bacteria or a radioactive isotope, but thankfully they seem unbothered.
The students decode a response in which the aliens explain that they have transcended the concept of half-life.

The aliens use a more general concept called α–life. If α is a real number between 0 and 1, the α–life of a substance or
population experiencing exponential decay is the time it takes for it to decay to α times its initial value. The aliens denote the
α–life by Lα . For example, if α = 0.5 then L0.5 is the usual half-life.
2. (3 points) This is too complicated for the UTSG students to wrap their minds around, so UTM MAT136 students are
summoned to explain the situation.

(a) (1 point) The aliens prefer the concept of π1 –life to half-life. What is the the π1 –life of the population of Karhide?

(b) (1 point) If α and β are two real numbers such that 0 < α < β < 1, will Lα be greater or less than Lβ ? Explain.

Clearly state your answer (“greater” or “less”) at the top of your solution, and explain how you know it’s true below. Your
answer to this part should not involve any computation/algebra (the UTSG students can’t handle it), just two or three
sentences of written explanation.

(c) (1 point) To demonstrate their mastery, the UTM students want to solve all possible problems about α–life, once
and for all.

Consider a general exponential decay model f (t) = y0 e−kt .

If α and β are two real numbers where 0 < α < β < 1, derive a formula that relates the α–life Lα and the
β –life Lβ of the substance/quantity being modeled.
Hint: Start by finding expressions for Lα and Lβ individually, then think about how you can combine them. Once you have
an answer, you can check if it agrees with your answers to the previous two parts.

2
MAT136 – Integral Calculus - Winter 2025 Written Assignment

Fresh off of their success explaining α–life, UTM students are called to meet with UTSG engineering students to help them
with a project. The engineers are less concerned with learning about the aliens’ culture and history, and more interested in
building cool rockets.

The engineers think they have decoded designs for an alien propulsion system from the messages sent by the ship. They
have constructed a rocket, but are not yet sure if it will do what they need it to do.

They plan to fire the rocket straight up. The alien rocket design will have the following velocity at time t (starting from t = 0),
measured in millions of kilometres per hour.

v(t) = (1 + t + sin t) e−t

3. (1 point) Two computations, as a warm-up for the next question.

∫
(a) (0.5 points) Find the antiderivative sin(t) e−t dt.

Recall that we did a very similar example in lectures.

sin x + cos x
(b) (0.5 points) Use the Squeeze Theorem (think back to MAT135!) to show that lim = 0.
x→∞ ex

The engineers’ goal for the first test of their design is to hit a small asteroid which will be exactly 2.5 million kilometres above
the launch site at the moment of the launch. Some of them have tried to calculate in advance whether their plan can work,
but they were not sure of their answers.

4. (3 points) Calculate the total distance traveled by the rocket over the time interval [0, ∞). Will the rocket ever reach
the asteroid?

Show all your work for computing the total distance, then answer the follow-up question in at most two or three sentences below.

The answers to both of the warm-up questions will help at different stages of this question.

As the UTM students were answering the question above, more messages about the aliens’ rocket propulsion systems were
decoded. A group of particularly keen EngSci students draw up plans for a new rocket that they don’t fully understand. The
velocity of this new rocket will be given by the following function w , again measured in millions of kilometres per hour.

4
w(t) = (1 + t + sin t) e−t + √
3
.
t + f (t)

(The denominator of the second term is the cube root of t + f (t).)

Unfortunately, f is another unknown alien function. They were not able to decode enough of the messages about f to be
able to integrate it, but they did find out that π ≤ f (t) ≤ 4 for all t ≥ 0.

5. (2 points) Is the total distance traveled by this new rocket over the time interval [0, ∞) also finite? Carefully justify
your answer.