Clarifying Activity Students match the graphs below with possible functions from the list given. After students match the graphs to the functions above, they discuss their reasoning.
Students discuss the following questions to clarify their thinking.
Describe general characteristics of each parent function in the list, especially the characteristics that help you distinguish among the graphs of the functions. The student defines functions, describes characteristics of functions, and translates among verbal, numerical, graphical, and symbolic representations of functions, including polynomial, rational, radical, exponential, logarithmic, trigonometric and piece-wise defined functions. They discuss the benefits of each representation for finding the domain and range. For each curve, describe its domain and range. Use a graphing calculator in parametric mode to graph each curve in the xy-plane.