yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Constant of proportionality from equation


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

We are asked what is the constant of proportionality in the equation 4y is equal to 8x. Pause this video and have a go at this question.

All right, so we might be used to seeing constants of proportionality when we have equations in a slightly different form. A constant of proportionality is what do you multiply x by to get to y. So, y would be equal to our constant of proportionality times x, times x. But this isn't written in that form, so what we do is manipulate it a little bit so that we can see it in that form.

The obvious thing is we just need to solve for y. So, right now it says 4y is equal to 8x. Well, if we want to solve for y, we can just divide both sides by 4, and we are left with y is equal to 8 divided by 4, which is 2 times x. Well, now the constant of proportionality jumps out at us; to get y, we have to multiply x by 2. That is our constant of proportionality.

Let's do another example here. We're asked which equation has a constant of proportionality equal to one-half. Again, pause the video, try to answer it yourself.

Okay, so what we—I'm just going to go equation by equation and calculate their constants of proportionality and see which one has a constant of proportionality equal to one-half. So, this one right over here, choice A, clearly has a constant of proportionality of 1/8, so we can just rule that out. Equation B, right over here, clearly has a constant of proportionality of 4, not 1/2, so we could rule that one out.

Let's see the constant of proportionality for equation C. If we want to solve for y, we could divide both sides by 6. And so we're going to get y is equal to 3/6 times x. Well, 3/6 is the same thing as one-half times x, and so there you have it; we have a constant of proportionality of one-half. That's the choice I like.

We can verify that this one doesn't work. If you divide—if you want to solve for y, you divide both sides by 3 and you get y is equal to 9 divided by 3, which is 3x. So here, our constant of proportionality is 3, so we can feel good about choice C.

More Articles

View All
Treating systems (the hard way) | Forces and Newton's laws of motion | Physics | Khan Academy
All right, this problem is a classic. You’re going to see this in basically every single physics textbook. The problem is this: if you’ve got two masses tied together by a rope and that rope passes over a pulley, what’s the acceleration of the masses? In …
Daylight Saving Time 101 | National Geographic
Daylight saving time adds extra hours of daylight during the summer season while making the day shorter during the winter months. But who came up with the concept of daylight saving time, and how does it work? The concept of shifting our clocks to adjust…
The Water of Lost Hills | Water & Power: A California Heist
MARK: Rafaela, I know you feel grateful. Yes. To The Wonderful Company, and they have done things that no farmer will do. Yes. There’s a park now. There’s– Yes, I know. - The roads are better. There’s some houses. But the wages are still minimum. And t…
Economic profit for a monopoly | Microeconomics | Khan Academy
In this video, we’re going to think about the economic profit of a monopoly firm. To do that, we’re going to draw our standard price and quantity axes. So, that’s quantity and this is price, and this is going to of course be in dollars. We can first thin…
Partial derivative of a parametric surface, part 1
So we’ve just computed a vector-valued partial derivative of a vector-valued function, but the question is, what does this mean? What does this jumble of symbols actually mean in a, you know, more intuitive geometric setting? That has everything to do wi…
Crystalline and amorphous polymers | AP Chemistry | Khan Academy
Let’s talk a little bit about crystalline and amorphous polymers. Now, in previous videos we talked about crystalline versus amorphous solids. Crystalline solids have a very regular pattern; maybe they look something like this if you imagine the particle…