Question

A coal car on a train weighs 30 tons plus 1 ton per cubic yard of coal x that it carries. The total weight of a coal car is: f(x) = x + 30. How will the graph of this function change if the coal car weight is changed to 26 tons?

Answer 1

See explanations below

Explanation:

In the function

f(x) = x + 30

x represents the volume of coal in cubic yards.

The implicit coefficient of one, i.e. 1x, represents each cubic yard of coal weighs one ton.

The 30 represents the weight in tons of the empty coal car.

Thus when the weight of the coal car is only 26 tons, we replace 30 by 26 to get a new function

f(x) = x + 26.