An airplane has begun its decent for a landing. When the airplane is 150 miles west of its destination, it’s altitude is 25,000 feet. When the airplane is 90 miles west of its destination, it’s alitude is 19,000 feet. If the airplanes descent is modeled by linear function, where will the airplane be in relation to the runway when it’s hit ground level

Respuesta :

To start, we would want to know what variables we have and what they mean to us. For this, I'd use d for distance (west in miles) from the runway and h for height off the ground (in feet). Next we need to make a linear function to solve for d. To do this, we need a slope, which we could find by doing [tex]m= \frac{ d_{2} - d_{1} }{ h_{2} - h_{1} }[/tex] using your initial values as your 2 values. With this we get [tex]m= \frac{150-90}{25000-19000} = \frac{60}{6000} = \frac{1}{100}[/tex] or 0.01 as your slope. Now, using your first values and the point-slope form (and d for y, h for x), we get the equation d-150=0.01(h-25000) --> d-150=0.01h-250 --> d=0.01h-100 as your equation (you can plug in your known values to test). Lastly, we need the distance from the runway when the plane is at ground level, or at h=0. We plug that in and get -100. Seeing as this is in miles west of the runway, the negative tells us to swap our direction, so we get 100 miles east of the runway. This means our answer is the plane will be 100 miles east of the runway when it's at ground level.