Physics…that's offered in 11th grade at my school. Would it be the same course as the one you are talking about, probably?
Yeah...though, at the high school level, I don't know if they'd teach you how to derive things from first principles. Pray they don't, actually.
Functions like that are generally accompanied by learning to graph them, and then in calculus you learn to take their derivative. It's the same reasoning as story problems dealing with money—finding a real-world application for the underlying math so the students maybe won't think it's a waste of time.
Yeah, there's that I suppose. By now, though, I've had the usefulness of math sufficiently beaten into me that I don't need those application problems to motivate me to learn the tools.
Also, I've had enough of physics and engineering (at one point I thought I wanted to be a chemical engineer) to know that the "applications" they teach you in math classes are all but worthless for actually applying math to real problems in real fields. So, these problems have the opposite effect on me than was desired: I feel like they're a major waste of time.
It's even worse at BYU. The Physics and Engineering departments don't force you to memorize formulas for tests, but the Math department does, so doing application problems unnecessarily bloats the memorization load.