Stephen is a shy 10-year-old who rarely contributes in class by sharing his opinions on topics. Since the in the United States encourages students to say what they think, his continued shyness may negatively impact his academic achievement.

Horizontal asymptote at  tells us that the original graph has been translated down.since  ,  are positive.  also we can say that the point  has a smaller  -coordinate than  .this means that the  transformed exponential function is increasing as it goes to the right. as it goes from  to , the value of the exponential function increases. it goes from to something bigger, . therefore, as  . the left hand would be the side that approaches the horizontal asymptote.so the answer is d

You're asking in the ap section, so i'll give the ap calculus-style answer. alternatively, you can find the vertex of the parabola and use the "y"-coordinate as the answer.

the maximum height can occur at a critical number, that is, a number  such that  .

the derivative of  can be calculated as follows:



find a value of  that is a zero of the derivative:


this is parabola that is opening downward; we can assume there is a maximum at  .

to find that maximum, calculate  .