Today's soundtrack is Christmas With the Mills Family, a Spotify playlist that includes my favourite Christmas songs.
This evening, I'm working on the assignment portion of the lesson I did yesterday on analyzing the characteristics of quadratic functions in general form.
One concept that I neglected to cover yesterday is that of the factored form of a quadratic function: y = (x - x1)(x - x2). In this form, the x-intercepts of the function are -x1 and -x2. For example, the equation y = (x + 3)(x - 2) would have the x-intercepts of -3, 2.
When determining the x-intercepts of a quadratic function in the factored form, the following information is important to note:
- If a set of parentheses is preceded with a negative sign, its x-coordinate will be negative, regardless of the symbol inside of the parentheses
- if x is preceded with a constant (e.g. 4x - 5), we divide the second term by the first (5/4).