Slope is defined as the steepness of a line. This property has many real world practical applications for architects, engineers, builders, artists and video game developers. On this How to Find the Slope web page, you will learn how to calculate the slope of a line with various formulas.

It will help to have a basic understanding of arithmetic and algebra to follow along with this tutorial. In this article, you will see the visual explanation of slope as well as see how to determine slope from the equation of a line and from two points on a line. You may want to use graph paper to plot points although it is optional.

In the figure below, you have a ramp that is 2 meters tall and 6 meters long. To figure out the incline, you simply divide the height by the length. That means that the slope is 1/3 in this example.

Slope Figure

If you have a line in the standard form Ax + By = C, you can calculate the slope as m = -A/B.

Example: x - 4y = 0

m = -1/-4

m = 1/4

If you need to find the slope of a line that exists between two points, you use the formula: m = y₂ - y₁/x₂ - x₁ where (x₁,y₁) and (x₂,y₂) are points on the same line.

Example: Points (2,2) and (6,7)

m = (7 - 2)/(6-2)

m = 5/4