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Graphing Undened Slope, Zero Slope and More

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Instructor: Jeff Calareso

Jeff has taught high school English, math and other subjects. He has a master's degree in writing and
literature.
There are two special cases when it comes to lines in the xy plane. Without any additional information, these
examples can be pretty confusing. But with a little instruction, they end up being some of the easiest lines to
graph!

Zero Slope
This lesson is on what the heck zero slope and undened slope
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(http://study.com/academy/lesson/undened-slope-denition-examples-quiz.html)
really mean. They're kind of weird terms that get really confusing and easy to mix up. So let's
start with what we know.
We know that lines that go up from left to right
have a positive slope and lines that go down have a
negative slope. So if I have a steeper line that's
going up more than it's going over, this line maybe
has a slope of 2, because it has a rise over a run of
2/1. As it gets a little bit atter, maybe it's only
going up 1 for every 1 it's going over, so now it has
a slope of 1/1. Then it gets a little bit atter, so it
goes over 2 and up 1, so it has a slope of 1/2.

Lines that go up from left to right have a positive slope.

As it attens out, the slope might get down to 0.01.

Then it attens out even more and it's 0.001.Then it gets even atter and it looks like it's almost
perfectly at, but the slope is still 0.0001. As it gets atter and atter and atter, the number
gets smaller and smaller and smaller, until the point where it becomes perfectly at and my
slope hits 0.
A zero slope just means that it's a perfectly at line. It's horizontal. It doesn't go up or down.
It's perfectly at.

As the slope attens out, it is equal to 0.0001.

This makes sense, right? If it were to go down at all, my slope would become -0.00001. And
then if it was a little bit more down, my slope would be -0.01. Then a little more would be -0.1.
Then -1, -2, -5 or -10, whatever we want.
So the zero slope is right in between the negative slope lines
(http://study.com/academy/lesson/negative-slope-lines-denition-examples-quiz.html) and the
positive slope lines. It's perfectly at.
Then the question becomes: what's the equation of this line? This is another thing that's really
easy to get mixed up. But it turns out that the equation - I should say the equations - of lines
that have zero slope are always y equals something .
There are two ways of thinking about this. One way is that it has a zero slope, so you could use
the slope-intercept form (http://study.com/academy/lesson/slope-intercept-form-denitionexamples-quiz.html) and say it's y = 0x + b. In this case my y-intercept is 3, so it's 0x + 3. That
just means that y = 3, because 0 * x = 0.
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But that requires you to know slope-intercept form, and there are a lot of other things going
on, and I usually prefer more intuitive ways. The way I think about this is that everywhere on
this line, no matter where I pick, y = 3, but x can be anything we want. X could be 4 or -1 or -3
or 10 or -5000. X can be anything that we want, but y always has to be 3. Therefore, my
equation is y = 3.

Undened Slope
We can use similar logic to gure out what the slope
of a perfectly vertical line is, a line that goes straight
up and down. Again, let's start with a line that is kind
of normal. It goes over 1 and up 1. It's got a slope of
1/1, which is 1. But then it gets a little bit steeper, so
this time it's only going over 1, but it's going up 2; so
it's slope is 2/1, or 2. Then maybe it goes over 1 and
up 4, so its slope is 4.
Then it gets even steeper and it's got a slope of 10,

X can be any number, but y must always equal three.

then maybe 100, maybe 1,000,000. It basically looks

like it's going up and down but it's going a tiny bit over. It's just super steep. It's nothing you'd
ever want to climb up. But it's not quite vertical.
Then, at the point it hits vertical, it goes from 1,000,000 to 10,000,000 to 99,000,000 to innity.
We hit the point where it doesn't even become a number, but more of just an idea. Because of
that, we usually call the slope of vertical lines undened.
We don't really have a number that describes it. It's kind of innity. I like to think of it
personally as innity, but it's really just undened. It's not really a number. So, an undened
slope is a line that goes straight up and down. It's vertical.

An undened slope is a line that goes straight up and

down; it is vertical.

So then the question becomes: what are the equations of these lines? As it turns out, these
equations, instead of being y =, are going to be x = lines. Again, there are really two ways to
think about this.

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You can either think about it as these equations don't have a slope, so the normal slopeintercept form, y = mx + b, won't do. It doesn't have a slope, so slope-intercept form is no good,
which means it's not y =, it's x =.
But again, that's kind of confusing and I don't personally use that way. I'd rather just think of it
as: what are the different points on my line? Well, at this point, x = -4 and y = -2. And at this
point, x = -4 and y = 4. At this point, x = -4 and y = -5. Up here, x could be -4 and y could be 100.
On every single one of these points that we pick, x = -4. Y can be anything we want, but x is
always -4. Therefore, the equation of it is x = -4.

Lesson Summary
To review, we've got two types of kind of weird lines: ones that go straight left and right, which
are horizontal, and ones that go straight up and down, which are vertical. The horizontal ones
have a slope of zero, because they're right in between the positives and the negatives. Their
equations are y =, because no matter what, y is always the same thing.
Vertical lines have a slope of innity or, more commonly, an undened slope. They have
equations that are x =, because no matter what, any point on the line has x at the same value.
Y can be anything we want, but x is always the same.

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