Name:______________

The Area Between Two Curves

DeLacy-sensei is designing a floor for her kitchen. Because shes very mathematical, she decides to create a mosaic out of cut tiles whose edges follow the path of functions. Shes created a miniature mockup of what her floor will look like. You have the tiles shes designed in front of you. It is your job as the architect to figure out how to make this mosaic floor actually work in DeLacy-senseis kitchen. Exercise 1: Please take the colored tiles in front of you and assemble them into a rectangle. When youre done, paste them onto the coordinate grid below.

Try to find the equations for all the different functions DeLacy-sensei used. There are 6 of them. Naming them would help, so let the first one be (a) (b) (c) and well just continue through the alphabet. (d) (e) (f)

Exercise 2: Because this is just a model, we will want to figure out how to scale it much bigger. Suppose each grid square represents a square foot. We would like to find the area of each of these tiles in square feet so that we can figure out how to make them in real life. You know how to find the area between a curve and the x-axis using an integral. Can you use this knowledge to find the area of each piece of the mosaic? Ill talk you through finding the area of one of the pieces, then its up to you to find the areas of the others. Lets start with the area of the blue piece. (a) Over what x- interval is the blue piece graphed? (b) What is the function that defines the upper bound of the blue piece? (c) Find the area between this function and the x-axis over the interval you gave in part (a).

(d) This area includes a bunch of red space. What function defines the upper bound of the red space? (e) Find the area between this function and the x-axis.

(f) Now, you should have everything you need to find the area of the blue tile which is:

Exercise 3: Repeat the above process to find the areas of each of the following: (a) The red tile (c) One of the green tiles (e) One of the orange tiles.

(b) One of the yellow tiles

(d) One of the purple tiles

Exercise 4: Andrew, DeLacy-senseis husband really doesnt like her tile design. For one thing, the kitchen is oriented east-west so he thinks that the design should be tilted on its side. For another thing, he thinks her design is way too busy and garish. So hes designed his own mosaic, but being a physicist, he also used functions to define the outlines of his tiles. Assemble Andrews tiles on the grid below.

Try to find the equations for all the different functions Andrew used. There are 3 of them. Note that they are oriented sideways- against the y-axis. It might make more sense to define these functions in terms of y instead of in terms of x. See if you can find equations for these functions in terms of y. Well name them starting from (a) . (b) (c)

Exercise 5: Again, we would like to find the area of each of the different tile pieces. But this time, we want to find the areas between the function and the y-axis. See if you can figure out how to do this. The first thing you will want to do for each tile is define the y values it is graphed between. You can double check your answers by estimating the area based on the grid. (a) Find the area of one of the dark blue tiles (c) Find the area of the light green tile

(b) Find the area of one of the light blue tiles

(d) Find the area of the dark green tile

Exercise 6: Try to find the area of the lower light blue tile but oriented against the x-axis instead of the y-axis (rewrite the functions in terms of x instead of y.) Can you see the usefulness of being able to take the area between a function and the y-axis as well as between a function and the x-axis?

Exercise 7: Which design do you think DeLacy-sensei and Andrew should choose?