Some elementary life table approximations

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In the course of some recent work (cf. reference 2) it proved necessary to construct a life table from a set of graduated values of m(x), the central death rate at exact age x. This meant that values of q(x) had to be derived in order to produce the life table from a given radix. Since the values of m(x) were known only for integer values of x, it was necessary to use an approximate method to derive the corresponding values of q(x) at each age. In this note we discuss briefly the approximations which we adopted.