Intercepts with the axes are where your line touches the x or y axis. An example is a straight line, say, y=4x+2. In this case, the y-intercept is 2 because the line touches the y-axis at (0, 2). With y=mx+b format, the y-intercept is b. To find the x-intercept of an equation in y=mx+b format, set y to zero and solve for x. In a parabola, the x-intercepts would be the roots. An example of this is x^2 - 5x + 4 = 0. The roots here are (4,0) and (1,0). Hopefully this helped.