Question

difference between direct and indirect propertion

Answer 1

Equations with direct and inverse variation sound a little intimidating, but really, they're just two different ways of talking about how one number changes relative to another number.

In direct variation, as one number increases, so does the other. This is also called direct proportion: they're the same thing. An example of this is relationship between age and height. As the age in years of a child increases, the height will also increase.

In the abstract, we can express direct variation by using the equation y = kx.

x and y are the two quantities - in our example, they'd be the age and the height of the child. k is called the constant of proportionality: it tells you specifically how much bigger y will get for every increase in x. For example, maybe y = 2x: this means that for every increase in x, y will increase by double that amount.

You can see that the bigger the number you plug in for x, the bigger the resulting value of y will be.

In inverse variation, it's exactly the opposite: as one number increases, the other decreases. This is also called inverse proportion. An example would be the relationship between time spent goofing off in class and your grade on the midterm. The more you goof off, the lower your score on the test.

If we wanted to give this one an equation, we would say:

y = k/x, where x and y are the two quantities, and k is still the constant of proportionality, telling how much one varies when the other changes.

You can see that in this equation, you divide a constant number by x to get the value of y. So the bigger the value of x, the smaller the value of y will be. That's inverse variation: as one goes up, the other goes down.