Linear equations

What is a linear equation?


Linear equations are equations like this:

where M & C represent fixed numbers, such as 3, 5.6, 216 or whatever you like.

An equation like this represents a line on a graph - where the gradient of the line is equal to M and the point where the line crosses the y axis is at C.

In the example above the blue line crosses the y axis at point 1 so C = 1. The line goes up 1 square for every 2 horizontal squares, so the gradient is worked out as 1 divided by 2, so M = 0.5.

So, the above line represents the linear equation: