A familiar engine roar filled the air as the bus they had been waiting for pulled into the bay at the interchange, creating a temporary breeze that momentarily lifted the hunk’s silky flowing hair into thousands of little cosine waves.
Invoking her supreme mathematical powers honed through her years at The Temple, our cutie π schoolgirl managed to narrow down the location of the hunk’s π-spot to that π tattoo on his shoulder!
As Fate had it, the bus door hissed open that very moment and the queue began to move.
And as Fate would have it, all that stood between the hunk and the schoolgirl was one big fat ugly butch with a waistline that stretched from railing to railing, and who was rapidly moving along at a top speed of 1-10m/hr.
– for those who’ve never seen one
With the hunk rapidly disappearing into the distance , along with her hopes of showing him off to her bitchy Eurasian girlfriends, the schoolgirl decided to throw caution to the wind and did the most un-girly thing imaginable – she scaled the railing in her CHIJ school uniform, crudely brushed aside an insurance agent asking her to do a survey, to make a last-ditch dash for that shoulder of the hunk who was already boarding the bus.
Time seemed to slow down, Matrix-style, as she lunged herself towards that inviting π tattoo, as her future, her fate, her destiny, hinged on this moment when the bus doors began to hiss again …
Given that, as she lunged herself at the last moment, the movement of the schoolgirl’s outstretched hand followed a path represented by a quadratic curve, and that:
The quadratic curve is symmetrical about the line x = 2 and passes through the points (-1, -11) and (4, 9). Find the coordinates of the maximum or minimum point of the curve.
And given that the π tattoo is located at the coordinate (2, 26), did she make it?
IMPORTANT: In Quadratic Equations questions, whenever you see the phrase symmetrical about the line x = h (where h can be any number), that’s normally the cue for you to use your quadratic expression in the completed square form i.e.
y = a(x – h)2 + k
And needless to say, when a quadratic curve is symmetrical about h, it’s maximum/minimum point will occur at x = h 😉
