Finding the Slope of a Line from an Equation

If we want to find the slope of a line and we have the equation, we can do so using one of the many methods for finding the slope of a line from an equation Finding the slope of a line from an equation is an important skill and can involve using slope-intercept form or finding two points to calculate it. An understanding of how to write an equation in slope-intercept form is important.

When you're working with equations of lines there's lots of different forms that you might write an equation to describe the same line. The most often used form of equations for line is called the "Slope Intercept Form," and it looks like this y=mx+b. Be careful sometimes peoples b's looks like 6's so just be aware that if you see y=mx+ [IB] it's probably going to be a b and not a 6.

In this equation m stands for slope and it's kind of weird because slope doesn't start with the letter m you're just going to have to get used to that same thing with b, b stands for the y intercept even though y intercept has nothing to do with the letter b it's kind of tricky in that way. But this equations are going to show up really really often and when you write it y and x are going to stay as those variable letters, like your equation answer will look like y equals some number x plus or maybe minus it might be negative some number here. So this is again what's called the slope intercept form of the equation of a line and we call it that because it uses a slope and the intercept.