Growth With a Ceiling

You'll learnto read the carrying capacity off either standard form, to put the fastest growth and the inflection point together at half capacity, and to say what a population does in the long run without solving anything.

Exponential growth has no ceiling, and nothing real behaves that way for long. The logistic model keeps the exponential idea and multiplies it by a second factor that shuts the growth down as the quantity fills the space available. Almost everything a question asks about it can then be read off without solving anything at all. Twelve short steps; press Next for each one.

12 STEPS · 6 QUICK CHECKS · HALF CAPACITY IS WHERE EVERYTHING HAPPENS · v2

half capacity is the fastest growth and the bend, one population

Before you start

What you're looking at

A population against time on most beats, and on two of them the rate plotted against the population itself, which is where this topic's key picture lives.

The question

Where does a population with a ceiling grow fastest, where does its curve stop bending upward, and where does it end up?

Step 1 / 12