McGraw Hill Glencoe Algebra 2, 2012
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McGraw Hill Glencoe Algebra 2, 2012 View details
3. Rate of Change and Slope
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Exercise 2 Page 79

Can you identify a pattern of change between each row in the table?

16/5cm^3/sec

Practice makes perfect

To determine the rate of change in the given table, let's see if we can identify a pattern of change between each row. Note that "time" is the independent variable, usually represented by x, and "volume" is the dependent variable, usually expressed by y.

Change in x Time (sec) Volume (cm^3) Change in y
5 16
+5 ↪ 10 32 +16 ↩
+5 ↪ 15 48 +16 ↩
+5 ↪ 20 64 +16 ↩
+5 ↪ 25 80 +16 ↩
Rate of change is defined as the change in dependent variable over the change in independent variable. rate of change=Change in y/Change in x Looking at the patterns of change in the table, we see that every time x increases by 5, y increases by 16. We can substitute these values into the equation to obtain the rate of change.

rate of change=Change in y/Change in x
rate of change=16/5

The rate of change is 165cm^3/sec.