Basic Technical Mathematics, 11th Edition

13.7 Graphs on Logarithmic and Semilogarithmic Paper

• Logarithmic Scale • Semilogarithmic (Semilog) Paper • Logarithmic (Log-Log) Paper

When constructing the graphs of some functions, one of the variables changes much more rapidly than the other. We saw this in graphing the exponential and logarithmic functions in Sections 13.1 and 13.2. The following example illustrates this point.

EXAMPLE 1 Graph of exponential function

Plot the graph of $y\hspace{0.17em}=\hspace{0.17em}4(3^x)\hspace{0.17em}.\hspace{0.17em}$

Constructing the following table of values,

x	$\hspace{0.17em}-\hspace{0.17em}1$	0	1	2	3	4	5
y	1.3	4	12	36	108	324	972

we then plot these values as shown in Fig. 13.21(a).

Fig. 13.21

We see that as x changes from ...