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| Question 697930:  How do you graph equations? my problem is y= (-1) and my teacher gave me a piece of grid paper but I don't understand how to do it.
 Found 2 solutions by  stanbon, josmiceli:
 Answer by stanbon(75887)
      (Show Source): 
You can put this solution on YOUR website! How do you graph equations? my problem is y= (-1) and my teacher gave me a piece of grid paper but I don't understand how to do it. -------
 Draw a set of axes on the grid paper.
 Plot a few points and plot each point on the x/y system.
 Let x = -2 ; y = -1 gives you point (-2,-1)
 Let x = 0  ; y = -1 gives you point (0,-1)
 Let x = 2 ; y = -1 gives you point (2,-1)
 ------------
 Draw a line thru the points.
 You should see a horizontal line passing thru all the
 points where y = -1.
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 Cheers,
 Stan H.
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Answer by josmiceli(19441)
      (Show Source): 
You can put this solution on YOUR website! The idea behind graphing is that no matter where you are on a plane surface, all you need is 2 numbers in order
 to tell someone where you are.
 Suppose you are on a flat plane with nothing in sight to
 use as a description of where you are. Then you notice there are
 2 straight lines intersecting at right angles that extend to
 infinity.
 Now all you have to do is measure your distance, (a) from one line
 ( call it the y-axis ), then measure your distance, (b) from the
 other line ( call it the x-axis ). Now your position is:
 ( x[1] , y[1] ) = ( a , b )
 where a and b are the measurements you made.
 -----------------------------------------
 Now your problem is to really understand what
  means. I just told you that you needed 2 measurements to
 locate a point on a plane, so this can't be a point.
 What it is is a line, but this line always sees
  when it looks at the y-axis, but it can see anything when it looks at the x-axis.
 So this is the line
  which is parallel to the x-axis and intersects the y-axis at the point (0,-1).
 So if you pick a point at random on this line, you see a random point on the x-axis,
 but you see
  on the y-axis --------------
 Hope all this helps. It wasn't easy for me, and the
 only way to fully get it is to just keep working
 problems or comprehension exercises.
 
 
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