# Rectangular Coordinate System

##### New member
Alright, I can't seem to understand what they're doing on this problem.

The book (Saxon Algebra 1, second ed.) tells me to graph the following equations on a rectangular coordinate system.

Problem #11: x= -11/2
Problem #13 : y= 11/3x - 2

I understand #11 perfectly, but #13 has me totally confused. I can't seem to get the image in here, so here's the link to the solution, if someone could explain it to me.

#### Denis

##### Senior Member
Problem #13 : y= 11/3x - 2
Hmmm...hard on the peepers...
looks like 1^(1/3) times (x-2);
since 1^(anything) = 1, then that's simply x - 2 ...I think...

##### New member
Thanks for the quick reply Denis!

Have you ever had one of those days? Apparently I'm experiencing one.

Somehow I seem to have turned my negative sign into a one. The real problem is: y = -1/3x - 2

If you could find it in your heart to assist me again, it would be greatly appreciated.

#### Gene

##### Senior Member
Ya gotta stop in at Wal-Mart and pick up a bunch of ()s. Then use them so we know if you mean
y=-1/(3x) -2 or
-1/(3x-2) or
(-1/3)*x -2 or ???
We could use PEMDAS (that would be the last one) but so many times you people don't that we wold appreciate your using them even if they aren't necessary.

#### Denis

##### Senior Member
Probably is: y = (-1/3)x - 2 ; y = mx + b
(since graphing seems to be involved)
If that's the case, you got your slope (-1/3) and y-intercept (-2)....
{"found_math": false, "script_math_tex": 0, "script_math_asciimath": 0, "math_annotations": 0, "math_alttext": 0, "mathml": 0, "mathjax_tag": 0, "mathjax_inline_tex": 0, "mathjax_display_tex": 0, "mathjax_asciimath": 0, "img_math": 0, "codecogs_latex": 0, "wp_latex": 0, "mimetex.cgi": 0, "/images/math/codecogs": 0, "mathtex.cgi": 0, "katex": 0, "math-container": 0, "wp-katex-eq": 0, "align": 0, "equation": 0, "x-ck12": 0, "texerror": 0, "url": "https://www.freemathhelp.com/forum/threads/rectangular-coordinate-system.37801/", "fetch_time": 1553496028000000000, "content_mime_type": "text/html", "warc_filename": "crawl-data/CC-MAIN-2019-13/segments/1552912203755.18/warc/CC-MAIN-20190325051359-20190325073359-00375.warc.gz", "warc_record_offset": 779828286, "warc_record_length": 10685, "token_count": 425, "char_count": 1466, "score": 3.609375, "int_score": 4, "crawl": "CC-MAIN-2019-13", "snapshot_type": "latest", "language": "en", "language_score": 0.9584035277366638, "file_path": "/sailhome/yjruan/project/latent-lm/data/processed/finemath-4plus/finemath-4plus/train-00032-of-00064.parquet"}