Slope :)

A fun and basic concept you may have learned in grade school and extended on in high school is the slope of a line.
While we learn slope as just "here is the slope of a line on a graph", there are some more practical uses for slope. The slope itself is a "rate of change" and can be used to calculate the equation of the line. This is needed to find things such as calculating jumps off a bike, how steep something may be, the actual straight line distance between two points, and so on.

For you math nerds, the slope of the line is also equal to the first derivative of the equation, so if you find the derivative of an equation, you just found its slope! and vice versa. Knowing this can make some problems that may seem impossible to find the slope or derivative of quite simple and basic!

Slope at its basic is RISE OVER RUN
or rise/run

When calculating slope, it is also delta y/delta x or the change in y over the change in x

Here is a visual rep of what happens with slope!

in the example above we want to find the slope of y. To do so, we pick two points, usually near the endpoints of the line if possible. We choose (2,2) and (-2, -4)

The long equation for slope is y2-y1/x2-x1

In this case, -4-2/-2-2= -6/-2 or 3/2                  3/2 is our slope!

As i said earlier, you can also find the slope at a certain point by finding the derivative

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXwVLvAWBzE

This youtube video does a great job explaining this extra concept!

Happy Mathing!