How does dividing rise/sum result in the slope of a line?

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I can't get my head around how dividing the differences of two points gives us the inclination of a line. I do understand that the slope will show how much or little a change in $X$ will affect the change in $Y$ but I can't figure out why we find the slope by division. Does division somehow mean average out? If so why?

Thanks in advance.

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Welcome to MSE!

Let's work with lines through the origin, with the equation $y=mx$. The $+b$ does nothing but shift the line up and down, which does not interact with the slope at all.

As you've noticed, the slope $m$ in the formula $y=mx$ tells you how much the $y$ coordinate changes compared to the $x$ coordinate. For instance, if we change our $x$ coordinate by $1$ (say by moving from $x=3$ to $x=4$) then our $y$ coordinate changes by $m$ (it moves from $y=3m$ to $y=4m$).

In particular, if we know the slope $m$ and the change in $x$ (call it $\Delta x$) then we can compute the change in $y$ (call it $\Delta y$) by $\Delta y = m \Delta x$ (do you see why?).

But we're interested in going the other direction. If we know how $y$ changes with respect to $x$, we want to compute the slope. But since division undoes multiplication, we can solve the above equation for $m$ to find

$$m = \frac{\Delta y}{\Delta x}$$

as you surely expected.


As a quick exercise, what happens if we use the general formula $y=mx+b$ instead of the simplified $y=mx$? Do you see why the $+b$ doesn't change any of our computations? It will have something to do with the fact that we're working with changes in $x$ and $y$, whereas the $+b$ doesn't change!


I hope this helps ^_^