Driving down a mountain, Tom finds that he has descended 1800 ft
in elevation by the time he is 3.25 mi horizontally away from the top of the
mountain. Find the slope of his descent to the nearest hundredth.
I put the numbers into the equation like:
1800/3.25*5280
1800/17160
= 0.10489
= 0.10
but my question is, does this need to be a negative 0.10 because it is the slope of decent? or did I even set up the problem right??
It is OK to specify the slope of the road as a postive number (0.10 in this case) , since you are talking about the road itself, regardless of the direction that it is being driven. Road slopes are always presented as positive numbers
wow, thank you so much for your help!! :D you're awesome!
You're welcome! I'm glad I could help you out. Just to clarify, when dealing with slopes in mathematics, the convention is to represent uphill slopes as positive and downhill slopes as negative. However, in the context of road slopes, it is common to present them as positive numbers, regardless of the direction of descent.
In your case, you correctly calculated the slope of descent to be 0.10. So there is no need to make it negative. Keep in mind that this value represents the ratio of the change in elevation (1800 ft) to the horizontal distance traveled (3.25 mi or 17160 ft). The slope is the rise over run, or the change in vertical position divided by the change in horizontal position.