How do you graph y = 3^x by plotting points?

1 Answer
JMicheli
Jul 10, 2016

Simply calculate the y values for a range of x values and connect the dots.

Explanation:

I usually start with integer values, some positive, and some negative. Let's go with:
x = -3
x = -2
x = -1
x = 0
x = 1
x = 2
x = 3

The corresponding y values will be:
y = 1/27
y = 1/9
y = 1/3
y = 1
y = 9
y = 27

So we can see that the graph is quickly approaching zero in the negative region (really we could have seen this simply by observing that 3^x is simply an increasingly large number in the denominator for negative x). In the positives, it is quickly increasing. The final result should be a graph looking like this:

graph{3^x [-5, 5, -2.5, 2.5]}

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