Article:Wells' statistics are outstanding

.

Student Project for Calculus

For this project, we compared the “greatness” of two very talented football players, Jerry Rice and Warren Wells. To do this, we examined a list on rankings for several categories. We then took this information and created a graph for each player.

We decided that we could determine the area under the curve and that the player with the largest total area would be “the greatest.” To do this, we divided the graph into sections and determined the area of each section and then took the sum of the sections.

We took the first two ordered pairs, for Jerry Rice that was (5, 27) and (10,27).

We used these to find the slope:

m= (y 2 -y 1)/(x 2 -x 1) = (27-27)/(10-5)= 0/5= 0

We then plugged the slope and the first ordered pair into the slope-intercept formula:

y-y 1 =m(x-x 1)

y-27= 0(x-5)

y= 27

To get the area under the curve, we next took the integral of the equation we just got:

∫ 0 5   y dy

∫ 0 5 (27)dy

27y ] 0 5

((27)(5))-((27)(0))

135 

The following is a list of the sets of ordered pairs we used:

Jerry Rice:

(5,27) (10,27)

(10,27) (15,13)

(15,13) (20,29)

(20,29) (25,32)

(25,32) (30,27)

(30,27) (35,33)

(35,33) (40,28)

(40,28) (45,29)

(45,29) (50,6)

Warren Wells:

(5,6) (10,10)

(10,10) (15,33)

(15,33) (20,28)

(20,28) (25,28)

(25,28) (30,33)

(30,33) (35,29)

(35,29) (40,10)

(40,10) (45,28)

(45,28) (50,11)

The total areas we calculated were:

Jerry Rice =1177.4

Warren Wells =1047.5

Therefore, we concluded that Jerry Rice is overall the greater of these two football players.

Note 1


 * This project is suitable for precalculus, using the area of trapezoids and rectangles.

Note 2: Your abstract has been successfully processed for the Washington , District of Columbia  meeting. January 2009

Copyright 2008 Damali:  used by permission of researcher, writer