SOLUTION: A roof rises 8.5 ft over a horizontal distance of 18.02 ft. What is the slope of the roof to the nearest hundredth?

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Question 88718: A roof rises 8.5 ft over a horizontal distance of 18.02 ft. What is the slope of the roof to the nearest hundredth?
Answer by bucky(2189) (Show Source):
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Slope is defined as the change in the vertical distance divided by the corresponding
change in the horizontal distance. In this problem the change in the vertical distance is
+ 8.5 ft and the corresponding change in the horizontal distance is 18.02 ft. So the slope
of the roof is:
.

.
and doing the division with a calculator gives you:
.

.
Rounding this to the nearest hundredth tells you to look at the third position to the right of
the decimal point. It is a 1. Since that is less than 5, you leave the second position
to the right of the decimal point at the value it is. So the rounded answer is:
.

.
Hope this helps you to understand the meaning of slope.