Exercise 5 Page 251

Graphing an inequality involves two main steps.

1. Drawing the boundary line.
2. Shading half of the plane to show the solution set.

Let's do these two things one at a time.

Boundary Line

To graph the inequality, we have to draw the boundary line. The equation of a boundary line is written by replacing the inequality symbol with an equals sign. Inequality & Boundary Line y > -1 & y = -1 Notice that the equation for this boundary line only has one variable. This equation is telling us that each and every point that lies on the line will have a y-coordinate equal to -1. This means that it is a horizontal line. Moreover, the inequality is strict, so the points on the boundary line are not included in the solution set. We will show this by drawing a dashed line.

Shading the Plane

To decide which side of the boundary line to shade, we will substitute a test point that is not on the boundary line into the given inequality. If the substitution creates a true statement, we shade the region that includes the test point. Otherwise, we shade the opposite region. Let's use (0,0) as our test point.

Because (0,0) is a solution, we should shade the half-plane that contains the origin.