Question

Find the slope of the line that passes through the points (1, 3) and (5, -7).

Answer 1

The slope of any line is the fraction $\frac{\Delta y}{\Delta x}$, where $\Delta y$ is the change in y-coordinate and $\Delta x$ is the change in x-coordinate.

To find these changes, we take the difference of the corresponding x and y coordinate for the two points. Here, our y-coordinates are -7 and 3, and our x-coordinates are 5 and 1, so our slope is

$\frac{-7-3}{5-1}=\frac{-10}{4}=\frac{-5}{2}$