Bacteria: Math Lesson

Science2_intro.jpg

Bacteria are tiny microbes that tend to grow very quickly and form huge colonies. One teaspoon of soil can be home to as many as 1,000,000,000 bacterial cells. Your body can have as many as 100,000,000,000,000 (a hundred trillion) bacterial cells. It’s hard to keep track of all those microbes, so we’ll look at some ways to manage the numbers.

In this lesson you will:

• Follow the growth of a bacterial colony on a line graph
• Match large numbers with their names
• Look at how exponents work
• Write large numbers using scientific notation (put those exponents to use)
• Observe exponential growth

Photo: Rocky Mountain Laboratories, NIAID, NIH