ABSTRACT
Comprehending graphs has many important implications, including consequences for our personal well-being. Comprehending graphs involves cognitive skills such as reading the data, finding relationships in the data, and reading beyond the data according to Friel, Curcio, and Bright in their review of research on making sense of graphs. A cognitive skill in comprehending graphs is finding relations in the data. This chapter discusses the graph not because it, alone, provides a clear establishment for this link, but because it provides an example of how graphs can help us reason about important quantitative relationships between variables. The importance of understanding the consequences of exponential growth is emphasized by Cole in her book The Universe and the Teacup: The Mathematics of Truth and Beauty She begins her chapter on exponential amplification by quoting Albert Bartlett, a former physics professor at the University of Colorado.
