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Half-life – WJECCollecting results

Radioactive isotopes are used for blood flow monitoring, cancer treatment, paper mills, carbon dating and smoke alarms. Each isotope used in these applications has a characteristic half-life.

Part of Physics (Single Science)Forces, space and radioactivity

Collecting results

A is useful to collect class results of the experiment. This spreadsheet has collected the results for the remaining dice from ten groups and then averaged them in the green column.

This technique reduces the effects of results and causes the decay graph to be smoother.

A 24-row table titled Radioactive decay - Dice analogy. Column 1 is labelled Throw number. Columns 2 to 11 are labelled Dice remaining (Groups). Column 13 is labelled Mean.

When you plot a graph of the mean number of dice remaining against the number of throws, you should get a graph that looks something like this.

Graph titled Dice model for radioactive decay. The Number of atoms remaining on the y-axis goes from 0 to 70. Number of throws on the x-axis goes from 0 to 35.

This graph is a model for radioactive decay.

Question

Approximately how many throws did it take for the number of dice to halve from the starting number?