If an employee earns $8.00 an hour, y=8x gives the total pay y the employee will earn for working x hours. For this equation, make and table of ordered pairs and a graph.

Question

2) What situations might make one representation more useful than another?Explain the relationships between the equation, the table, and the graph. How does each one describe the situation?

Answer 1

 

The above graph is an example of how you might want to draw the graph of y=8x on graph paper. The x axis is the hours worked and the y axis the pay received.

x hours	$y pay
10	80
20	160
30	240
40	320
50	400
60	480

The  table shows some of the values, and each row of the table corresponds to a point on the line.

The graph is better than the table for filling in the gaps that occur in the table. But the table gives accurate values. The equation gives the means to determine exact values, but it requires you to do a calculation, while the graph values can be read off from the coordinates without having to do any calculations.