Students examine the USA TODAY Snapshot "More of U.S.", construct a graph from the data, produce a mathematical model (linear) for the data, determine the rate of change for the data, and make predictions about future population levels.

For this task, students are shown a table of U.S. population data between 1790 and 1860 and are asked to explore whether exponential functions would be appropriate to model relationships within the data. The purpose of the task is to...