Y=mx b what does each letter stand for

How do I find the equation of a linear function that passes through 1, 7 and 2, 9? How do I use the graph of a linear function to find its equation? Which linear equation has a graph that passes through 0, -8 and 0, 15? See all questions in Linear Functions and Graphs. Impact of this question views around the world. You can reuse this answer Creative Commons License. Slope: Very often, linear-equation word problems deal with changes over the course of time; the equations will deal with how much something represented by the value on the vertical axis changes as time represented on the horizontal axis passes.

An exercise might, say, talk about how the population grows, year on year, in a certain city, assuming that the population increases by a certain fixed amount every year. For every year that passes that is, for every increase of 1 along the horizontal axis , the population would increase that is, move up along the vertical axis by that fixed amount.

For a time-based exercise, this will be the value when you started taking your reading or when you started tracking the time and its related changes. In the example from above, the y -intercept would be the population when the sociologists started keeping track of the population. Advisory: "When you started keeping track" is not the same as "when whatever it is that you're measuring started". Using the example above, your population-growth model might be very accurate for the years through , but the city whose population is being measured might have been founded way back in What is the slope?

This value tells me that, for every increase of 1 in my input variable t that is, for every increase of one year , the value of my output variable y will increase by 0. The slope tells me that, every year, the average lifespan of American women increased by 0. The intercept value tells me that, in when they started counting , the average lifespan of an American woman was 73 years.

This value tells me that, for every increase by 1 in my input variable t , I get a decrease of 32 in my output variable v. The slope tells me that, for every second that passes, the speed of the ball decreases by 32 feet per second. Also, by the way, the velocity will eventually become zero when the ball reaches the peak of its arc , and will then become negative when gravity takes over and pulls the ball back down to the ground.

The exercise defines v as measuring the velocity of the ball. Let's derive this formula using the equation for the slope of a line. Let us consider a line whose slope is 'm' and whose y-intercept is 'b'. Let x,y be any other random point on the line whose coordinates are not known.

We obtain the graph as follows. To find the y-intercept, substitute the value of 'x' as 0 in the equation and solve for 'y'. The slope value can be positive or negative. Here, 'm' gives the slope and 'b' gives the y-intercept of the equation. Example 1: Find the equation of the line whose graph contains the points 1,3 and 3,7.

Example 2: Find the slope-intercept form of a line with slope -2 and which passes through the point It is called as the slope intercept form.