Lesson 8A: Exploring Sinusoidal Functions

The sun is the brightest object in the Earth's sky. The sun rises and sets each day. Although the sunrise and sunset times are not the same day after day, the sunrise and sunset repeat over the period of a year. The sunrise in a particular location on a particular day in May is the same year after year. This repeating pattern is called a periodic event and can be represented by a periodic function.

Many natural processes have the property of being periodic—their behaviour repeats over and over. You see this kind of behaviour in the height of ocean tides that rise and fall in the same pattern about every twelve hours. You also see periodic behaviour in the pattern of temperature readings in a certain location from one year to the next. The periodic function that represents the rising of the sun is a special type of function called a sinusoidal function.

Sinusoidal functions are valuable to study because many naturally occurring events are sinusoidal. In this Training Camp, you will examine the characteristics of sinusoidal functions and investigate how the graph of a sinusoidal function relates to its corresponding equation.

By the end of this lesson, you should be able to

	describe the characteristics of a sinusoidal function by analyzing its graph
	describe the characteristics of a sinusoidal function by analyzing its equation
	match the equation of a sinusoidal function to its corresponding graph