Slope

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The slope of a line can be intuitively defined as how steep the line is. To be more precise, given two points $(x_1,y_1)$ and $(x_2,y_2)$ on a line, the slope is equal to

$\frac{y_1-y_2}{x_1-x_2}.$

Other ways of expressing this are

$\frac{\rm{rise}}{\rm{run}},$
$\frac{\Delta y}{\Delta x}$ (read "delta $y$ over delta $x$"),
or $\frac{\rm{change \ in \ } y}{\rm{change \ in \ } x}$.

See also