Slope of a Line
The effect of steepness, or slope, must be considered in a variety of everyday situations. Some examples are the grade of a road, the pitch of a roof, the incline of a wheelchair ramp, and the tilt of an unloading platform. Informally, slope is the ratio of the change in y (vertical change) to the change in x (horizontal change). The slope, denoted by m, of the nonvertical line through the points ( x 1 , y 1 ) and ( x 2 , y 2 ) is defined as follows:
When you are given several points on a line you can use any two of them to compute the slope. Furthermore, the slope of a line does not depend on the order in which the points are chosen because
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