We finished our unit on Quadratics and we had our unit test this week, it was honestly one of my favourite units in math (most likely). I never understood factoring but when Mrs. Burton explained it to us, it made sense for the first time and I really enjoy the fact that there are multiple different ways to factor and you get the same answer every time, it actually makes doing math fun.

This week, for the most part, was a review week, we spent the first two days reviewing for our test, Wednesday we had our unit test, and thursday we spent the class refreshing our memories on graphs and started our unit on “Properties of Quadratic Functions” and we learned about parabolas. I haven’t had much experiences with them, I’ve only seen them on textbook graphs but I never understood the meaning behind them.

Basically a parabola is a v-shaped figure on the graph, matching up points that make a v shape. It’s hard to explain because I don’t know much about them yet but I know that in an equation, the highest degree can be (²) and that the vertex (which is just the top, or bottom point of the graph) is either the lowest point of the graph, or the highest. That was pretty much the gist of, if we are given an expression “y+x²” (for example), we should be able to name the vertex, symmetrical, x-intercept, y-intercept, domain and range.

 

Since we didn’t get much practice, here is an example we did in class: