Week 7- The discriminant

The discriminant was an interesting and new concept that we haven’t explored thus far as pre-calculus 11 students, however I personally found it was a relatively simple concept to understand. The discriminant is essentially the radicand of the root used in the the quadratic equation

The purpose of the discriminant is to tell you how many solutions are possible to obtain for an equation, this is to say that you ARE NOT SOLVING, you are simply determining the number of possible solutions. If the discriminant is a positive number, there are a total of two possible solutions, if the discriminant is zero, there will be one possible solution, and when the discriminant is a negative number, there are no solutions. On a graph, the discriminant is representative of the number of times the line on the graph will cross the x-axis.

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