On this page, we hope to clear up problems that you might have
with finding the equation of a line. Many times, you'll have the
graph of an equation shown to you and you'll need to find the
equation. This seems a very daunting task, but it's actually
quite easy! For example, take a horizontal line such as y = 2.
Every point on that graph is 2 units above the x axis. All
horizontal lines have equations that are written in the same
format, such as y = -4.5. Because they're all written the same
way, we can come up with a general formula for horizontal lines.
It is the following equation (where k represents any real
number): y = k. Under the same assumptions, the general formula
for vertical lines can be written as follows (where k represents
any real number): x = k. Linear equations such as y = .009x + 34
also have a general equation that can represent any linear
equation. It is written as follows: y = mx + b. The things to
remember about the above formula, which is called the slope-
intercept formula, are outlin