Today, I jogged around the park from 7 a.m to 7:30 a.m. My Fitbit, the activity checking device, was monitoring my heartbeat during the entire run. At the beginning my heart rate was 125 bpm (beats per minute), while at the end it measured 165 bpm.
For the 30 minutes of jogging, which of the following bpm rates is not guaranteed to have been recorded by my Fitbit?
This section requires Javascript.
You are seeing this because something didn't load right. We suggest you, (a) try
refreshing the page, (b) enabling javascript if it is disabled on your browser and,
finally, (c)
loading the
non-javascript version of this page
. We're sorry about the hassle.
Recall the Intermediate Value Theorem (IVT):
For a continuous function f on the interval [ a , b ] , there exists a value y 0 between f ( a ) and f ( b ) for every number x 0 between a and b such that f ( x 0 ) = y 0 . Intuitively, what that translates to is for continuous variables like time, temperature, or distance, to get from point B to point Y , you must have crossed points C , D , E . . . V , W , X to get there. What this doesn't guarantee, on the other hand, is that you crossed A and Z , since those are outside of the range ( B , Y ) that IVT guarantees you "crossed."
In this example, our domain is time, [7:00, 7:30], and our range is heart rate measured in beats per minute, ( 1 2 5 , 1 6 5 ) . Because our function, heart rate as a function of time, is continuous, IVT guarantees that Pi's heart rate must have been all heart rates between 1 2 5 and 1 6 5 bpm at some point on the time interval [7:00, 7:30]. What the IVT, then, doesn't guarantee is that her heart rate was any value ≤ 1 2 5 and ≥ 1 6 5 , so our answer is 1 7 0 .