Algebra-1

We can solve this problem by following these steps:

 

Step 1: Determine the number of doubling periods

Since the bacteria culture doubles in size every 4 hours and we want to know the number of bacteria after 16 hours, we need to find out how many 4-hour periods are there in 16 hours.

 

To do this, we divide the total number of hours (16) by the length of each doubling period (4). So the number of doubling periods  is .

 

Step 2: Use the exponential growth formula

The formula for exponential growth in this case is , where:

 is the final number of bacteria.

 is the initial number of bacteria, which is  here.

 is the number of doubling periods, which we found to be .

 

Step 3: Plug in the values and calculate

Substitute

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