Practice Test 4, Section 3, Number 11 (No Calc)
I love this question because the fastest way to go involves almost no math. You just have to know a little bit about the shapes of lines and parabolas.
First, think about the parabola. Its equation is . From that we know it’s a parabola that opens up (the term will be positive) and has -intercepts at and . You should figure out its -intercept, too, by plugging in zero for :
Do a very rough drawing of that on your paper (forgive my MS Paint skillz, but your drawing can be sloppier than mine and still be plenty good enough):
Now do a rough drawing of the line. To do that, put it in slope-intercept form:
The important detail there is that the -intercept is , which is above the parabola’s -intercept of , so you know the line will intersect the parabola twice. Like so: