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Recognizing Dilations of Parabolas

Author: Graham Pardun

Vertical Dilations of Simple Quadratic Functions

In this lesson, we'll look at a few simple quadratic functions to explore what exactly the a-term does in something like y=ax^2. We'll see that the parabola will be vertically dilated -- a kind of translation which "stretches" or "compresses" the graph by multiplying all of its y-coordinates by a certain factor (a).