Graphing by Slope Intercept Form
So let's look at first what slope-intercept form is. Slope intercept form is actually y equals mx plus b. The reason why it is called slope intercept form is because it gives a slope and an intercept. So, here is your slope. Remember that slope is rise over run so this tells you how to move. This b part here is the y intercept, which tells you where to start. It won't always be in that form to begin with. So, you have to be really careful about that. If it's not in this form all you have to do is solve for y and make sure that the term with the x goes before the term with just the plain constant. Okay, so with that, let's actually see where we start which would be the 3. That's the y-intercept so we want to start at zero three. This is a little bit tricky just because it has a negative in the front. With this, we have to remember that negative one-fifth (1/5) is the same as negative 1 over 5 and is also equal to 1 over negative 5. We can choose either one of these. It doesn't matter which one you choose. Just because this one's first, we'll use that. This means we're going to go down 1 unit and then to the right 5. So, we're going to start here and this is how we're going to move to the next point that we need to plot. So we have (0, 3) and then we're going to move down 1 and then over 5, and then place our point. From here, we can go ahead and draw a straight line but what's nice about this graph is that it's nicely set up, so we can just keep on going in that direction. We're just going to go down 1 and over 5 once again. So it's over here on the edge. Now we can actually move a different way if we wanted to from this point. So if we wanted to move like this, we would move up 1 and then to the left 5 units. Remember, we are still going to start here, but then this is how we are going to move. So we are starting at (0, 3) and we are going to go up 1 and then over to the left 5 units, and we're just going to keep on going. Now, there’s a lot of dots to connect. Remember it's just a straight line that connects all of these. So I am going to attempt to draw a straight line. That's how you would graph one of your equations with slope intercept form.