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 9 Page 79

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

20/3mm/day

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 "height" is the dependent variable, usually expressed by y.

Change in x Time (day) Height (mm) Change in y
3 20
+3 ↪ 6 40 +20 ↩
+3 ↪ 9 60 +20 ↩
+3 ↪ 12 80 +20 ↩
+3 ↪ 15 100 +20 ↩
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 3, y increases by 20. 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=20/3

The rate of change is 203mm/day.