Examples Aging Out

The world is changing so fast with all the innovations in the digital world that companies have had to adjust their way of doing things to keep up.  Three industries in particular have changed enough that we can no longer use them as examples for linear equations.

The first used to be rental cars.  Students could check with a variety of rental agencies to find the going rates for renting one of their cars.  Usually, they'd be quoted a daily rate plus so much per mile such as $20.00 per day and $0.03 per mile.

These quotes could be compared to find which one provided the best deal under various circumstances such as which would be best to rent for a couple days or for a week.

In addition, students could check the price of flying to a location to compare it to renting a car to make the same trip.  Throw in the cost of a hotel room and let the students determine which mode of transport was more economical.  This type of exercise brought up questions by the students of how much is a person's time worth? 

The other industry which used to use a flat rate plus so much per minute is the cell phone industry.  Its changed from a flat rate per month plus so much per call to a flat rate per month with unlimited calling and so much per text sent to totally unlimited. 

These examples were great because you'd run across articles in the news about people who were not paying attention to the contents of their contract and would receive ridiculously high bills for texting way past the limit.  Those articles were great because I could find a basic rate with a per text cost and let the students determine how many texts the person sent. 

I found one article which resulted in a calculated number of texts somewhere over 200,000.  That day, the kids really got a shock when they found the number because that is way more than they usually do in a month.  Overtime, most cellular plans evolved into unlimited so you can download anything, use your google maps, send texts, and just talk on the phone.

The final industry is the personal transportation industry which used to be only populated by taxi's. Taxi's also worked on the base rate plus so much per tenth of a mile, or mile.  It was like $3.00 to arrive and $0.06 per tenth of a mile.  Another wonderful real world application of a linear equation but due to Lyft and Uber, this is slowly going away. 

For these two companies, you get a flat rate from pick-up to destination, the same as regular shuttle companies such as Prime Time and Super Shuttle.  These newer companies charge a flat rate per person or per group.  I use shuttles or public transit more often than taxi's. 

Its hard using any of these examples now because most of my students do not relate to them, so its time to find new examples which operate on the same principal so we have updated examples.

Let me know what you think, I'd love to hear.