Question

A school club is raising money for a trip, and needs to reach $10,000. Their fundraising progress is modeled by the function f(x) = 435 + 1200x, where x is measured in weeks. What is the meaning of the coefficient 1200?

Answer 1

If you recall, the formula for a line is y=mx+b, where m is the slope (or how much y increases as x changes by 1) and b is the y-intercept (the point (0,b) is where the line crosses the y-axis. So this means that 435 is the y-intercept and 1200 is the slope. since x is in weeks, and y changes by 1200 each week, then this is the money they get per week, and when x=0, y=435, so when they started fundraising, they had 435 dollars to start with.