Caleb’s Blog

For this weeks blog post, I will be using the general form equation, to get my x and y intercepts.

To get our x and y intercepts, we must first understand what general form is using an example.

12x -y +6 = 0

In general form, both x and y are on the same side of the equation, with x never being a negative, or a fraction if we are using general form.  General form is regarded to be the most useless out of the three equations of slope, because it does not tell us anything about our slope, unless we convert it into either point slope, or y intercept.

Our next step, using the same example, will be to pull out an old trick and do the x or y = 0.

So if our equation is 12x -y +6 = 0

12x -y +6 = 0 if x = 0 will give us something like this.

y int = (0,6)

Because if we make x 0 we still have two variables on one side of the equation. but if we take the y and put it on the other side of the equation, it gives us the answer, 6=y

To find the x intercept we will do something  like this.

12x -y +6 = 0

y=0

6=-12x

Here, we need to use some division.

6/-12 = -0.5

So this makes our x intercept.

x=-0.5

Here is a photo of our general form equation on a graph for those visual learners.

I chose this topic for my week 15 blog post because I believed that I understood it well, and was able to make it into a informative and understanding post.