<span>The best reason I can think of for why we believe that air is a mixture is that freezing air slowly yields different liquids at different temperatures. Liquid nitrogen has a different boiling point than liquid oxygen. They also freeze at different temperatures. If air were only 1 compound, then air in its entirety would have a single boiling point and a single freezing point. </span>
The gradient is the slope of a linear equation, represented in the simplest form as y = mx + b. In Earth Science, the gradient is usually used to measure how steep certain changes in elevation are.
In order to find the gradient in a topographical setting, one must know two things: the elevation of two points and the distance between the two points. Once these values are known, the gradient can be found by dividing the change in field value, or the change in elevation, by the distance. The higher the gradient value is, the steeper the slope is.
