Oh no! An incoming missile was detected by our radar network 14 seconds ago. The data is in a table on the right, and is also graphed on the left below. The horizontal axis is time (in seconds) and the vertical axis is height (in meters). [br][br]There's nothing to do in this activity, but take a look around to be sure you understand the connection between the table and the graph. [br][br]

One thing to notice is that the data is NOT linear. Notice that the rate of change of the height of the missile between consecutive readings is not constant. In fact, the rate of change of the missile appears to be decreasing slightly. [br][br]Here's the rate of change of the height of the missile between the first two readings[br][br][math]\frac{\left(817.68-617.4\right)meters}{\left(.69-0\right)seconds}\approx290.26\frac{meters}{second}[/math][br][br]And here's the rate of change between the second and third readings:[br][br][math]\frac{\left(2606.66-817.68\right)meters}{\left(7.65-0.69\right)seconds}\approx257.037\frac{meters}{second}[/math][br][br]Note, these are just slopes of lines ("rise over run") of measurements from the data set.[br][br]The data therefore indicates the missile is rising, but the rate of ascent is slowing down. [br][br]We'll take a closer look at this in the next activity when we attempt to model this data with a [b]function[/b]. Click "Next" on the bottom right to move forward.