Video · + 1 min read
Plug It In, Plug It In
Just like with the old Glade commercials, the key to evaluating functions is to "plug it in, plug it in."
(Video) 2004 Glade Plug-In Commercial
by 513official4
Suppose we're given the function: And we're asked to evaluate the function when . All you have to do is plug in everywhere you see an .
Similarly, you might be asked to find . This is the same thing as asking to evaluate the function when . Let's look at another example: Evaluate the function at .
Since the is in parentheses, we know that . So, like before, we plug in everywhere there's an .
The final type of question we can run into is one where they tell us what equals and we need to find . Suppose we have this function: Now, we want to find when . To solve these, we just write out the equation and solve for the missing variable, like we've done in the past. So when , . We can also write this as:
Practice
Given the function , find .
Since we want to find , we want to plug into all the spots where there's an .




