SOLUTION: Determine whether the graph of each parabola opens upward or downward. y= -1/2^x^2+3 Please help me to understand what parabola means. Textbook Elementary and Intermedia

Question 32006: Determine whether the graph of each parabola opens upward or downward.
y= -1/2^x^2+3
Please help me to understand what parabola means.

Textbook Elementary and Intermediate Algebra. Mark Dugopolski
ISBN: 13978-0-07-326862-0

Answer by Earlsdon(6294) (Show Source): You can put this solution on YOUR website!
A parabola is one of the "conic sections", so-called beacause it's one of the curves you get when you slice a right-circular cone in one of several ways.
The other conic sections are:
The circle, the ellipse, and the hyperbola.
You can "see" the parabola when you graph a quadratic equation.
You can tell which way the parabola opens from the sign of the coefficient of the -term.
If this coefficient is positive, the parabola opens upward.
If this coefficient is negative, the parabola opens downward.
In your problem, the quadratic equation is:
and you can see that the coefficient of the -term is negative, so the parabola opens downward.
Here's the graph of your equation:

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