Fitting Parabolas to Water Jets
Fitting Parabolas to Water Jets
Investigate how changing a, b, and c in a quadratic function affects how closely its parabola fits the path of a water jet.
Putting It All Together
Answer these open ended questions on your own or with others to form deeper math connections.
Open-ended question 1
A water jet can be modeled with a parabola, as in the activity above. What part of the water jet does the vertex describe?
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Open-ended question 2
How do you tell from the equation if the graph of a parabola is concave up or down?
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Open-ended question 3
How does the value of coefficient affect the width of the graph of a parabola of the form ?
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Open-ended question 4
Find the vertex of the parabola .
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Open-ended question 5
If you know the coordinates of the vertex and of one of the x-intercepts of the parabola, is it possible to determine the coordinates of the other x-intercept without solving the corresponding equation?
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Open-ended question 6
What other real life objects can be modeled using parabolas?
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Prerequisite Resources
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