Question

explain direct and inverse variation with 2 example​

Answer 1

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.

example -This might seem really complicated and confusing, but just remember the two formulas: y = kx for direct variation, and y = k/x for inverse variation. As you practice with example problems, you'll learn how to apply them to specific problems.

A very simple example is a problem like this one:

The population of a certain species of bacteria varies directly with the temperature. When the temperature is 35 degrees Celsius, there are 7 million bacteria. How many millions of bacteria are there when the temperature is 38 degrees Celsius?

First of all, we can see that we'll be using the direct variation equation, y = kx.

Now let's plug in what we have from the problem:

The problem gives us two values: temperature and number of bacteria. We'll plug in the temperature for x and the number of bacteria for y. This gives us 7 = k(35).

Now all we have to do is divide to find the value of k for this particular problem: it turns out to be 0.2.

The next step is to use that value to find out how many millions of bacteria there are at 38 degrees Celsius.