math homework help?

Perhaps you should learn from the answers to your earlier questions and not just post your complete homework here for us to answer. As a general help for your question:

1) Find the equation of the line thru the two given points

2) The line perpendicular to this line will have a slope of 1/m where m is the slope of your first line

3) Use this new slope, plus the point (0,0) to come up with the equation for your new line.

OK, it gives you two pieces of information here, and they just happen to be the two pieces of information to create an equation in slope-intercept (y=mx+b) form.

The first is the y-intercept. They tell you that the line passes through the origin: the point (0,0). That means the place it crosses the y axis (x=0) is 0.

The second is the slope. However, they don’t give you the slope straight out. They gave you *a* slope by giving you two points on a line.

(-3,0), (0,-3)

You find that slope by taking the rise (change in y) divided by the run (change in x), in other words…

(y2 – y1) / (x2 – x1) = (-3 – 0) / (0 – -3)

-3 / 3 = -1

But the line we’re looking for is perpendicular to that line. A second line — perpendicular to our line having slope M — will have the slope of

(-1) / M

In our case, the slope of our first line is (-1), meaning the slope of the target line will be…

(-1) / (-1) = 1

So, with m=1 and b=0, we find that…

The line through the origin that is perpendicular to the line passing through (-3,0) and (0,-3) has the equation:

y = 1x+0

or, y = x

The first answer was an excellent one…if you need a visual, check out http://www.wtamu.edu/academic/anns/mps/math/mathlab/int_algebra/int_alg_tut15_slope.htm

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