Math-MateSchool maths, made clearer

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Topic 39 · lesson 1 of 2

Lines of best fit

Clear explanations and worked examples from the Math-Mate school maths textbook.

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When all the points line up perfectly in a graph, it’s easy just to draw a straight line through them, like this:

Mathematical diagram

However, surprise surprise, points don’t always line up this nicely.  When they don’t, you need a way of drawing a line through the data to represent what you think the trend in the data is.  There are lots of different ways of doing this.  One of the simplest is a line of best fit.  We’ll use this graph to show how to do it:

Mathematical diagram