Problem 1 from HW 02 Derivative at a point asked me to find f'(3) for f(x)=5^x. After some review of logarithms, I found that
and WebWork accepted this answer as correct.
Does this mean that I need to know logarithms for the quiz?
First off, no you don’t need to know logarithms for this quiz - or any other for a while.
The expression f'(3) = 125\ln(5) arises from a differentiation rule for exponential functions. It represents the exact value of the derivative. Thus, this is really not the way to do the problem, which asks for an estimate to the value of the derivative.
I think that a correct answer to the problem would look more like
which is a decimal approximation to the f'(3).
We can do so with Desmos to get values for a table like the following: