SOLUTION: An airplane covered 15 miles of its route while decreasing its altitude by 22,000 feet. Find the slope of the airplane's line of descent. Round to the nearest hundredth. [Hint:

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Question 101378: An airplane covered 15 miles of its route while decreasing its altitude by 22,000 feet. Find the slope of the airplane's line of descent. Round to the nearest hundredth. [Hint: 1 mi = 5280 feet.]
Answer by doukungfoo(195) (Show Source):
You can put this solution on YOUR website!
When talking about the slope of a line we need to keep in mind that we are talking about . Rise is vertical movement, or when graphing a line it is movement on the y axis. Run is horizontal movement or again when graphing a line it is movement on the x axis.
The problem tells us the airplane covered 15 miles of its route while decreasing its altitude by 22,000 feet.
Ok so which is the rise and which is the run.
Well we know that altitude is a vertical measurement so this is a pretty good indication that the rise is 22,000 ft. So by default that would make 15 miles the run, and it makes sense because run is horizontal movement.
So the slope for the airplane's line of descent is:

But hold up a sec. We can't have two different units of measurement in our slope. We need to convert miles to feet and then reduce completely.
so we are given 1 mi = 5280 ft
just multiply 15*5280 = 79200
so now we have

and when we reduce this to lowest terms we get slope of

thats it