Video: How to Determine if a Slope Is Positive, Negative, Undefined, Zero or Imaginary at a Point on a Graph

How to Determine if a Slope Is Positive, Negative, Undefined, Zero or Imaginary at a Point on a Graph

You can determine if a slope is positive, negative, undefined, zero or imaginary at a point on a graph in a very specific way. Determine if a slope is positive, negative, undefined, zero or imaginary at a point on a graph with help from a distinguished math teacher in this free video clip.

Video Transcript

Hi my name is Marija and I'm a mathematician and today I'm going to tell you how to determine whether a slope is positive, negative, zero, undefined or imaginary on a point in a graph. So let's draw a coordinate plane with your X and Y axis and we're going to look at a few different lines and I'll show you what their slope is. If a line is going upwards, then this is a positive slope and you might say that it looks like it's going downwards if you start from here so the important thing to remember is that when you read a line you want to read it just like you read a book, from left to right. So if I read this line from left to right it's going upwards and that means that it's a positive slope, alright so we'll put a positive sign here. Now the opposite is going to happen with negative slopes. So let's draw another graph and if my line again from left to right, so I'm going to start on the left then go right, if it's going downwards, then this is going to be a negative slope line. So a positive slope goes up, negative slope goes down. Now a line that has a 0 slope is going to be a horizontal line. So this line right here which is horizontal is going to have a 0 slope. And the last slope that you need to know and when you say imaginary, the undefined imaginary are probably the same thing, is a vertical line. So if I draw a vertical line going up and down, that's going to have an undefined slope. So lines going upwards have a positive slope, lines going downwards have a negative slope, horizontal lines have a 0 slope and vertical lines have an undefined slope. And that's how you determine the slope of a line.

How to Determine if a Slope Is Positive, Negative, Undefined, Zero or Imaginary at a Point on a Graph

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