Q.Find the points of intersection of the line and the plane .
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Start your 14-day free trial to unlock the full solution →To find the intersection, we substitute the general point on the line into the plane's equation to solve for the parameter . The intersection point is .
When a line and a plane intersect, they share a common point. This means that the coordinates of this point must satisfy both the equation of the line and the equation of the plane simultaneously. Our strategy is to represent any general point on the line using its parametric form and then check which specific point (corresponding to a particular value of the parameter) also lies on the plane.
The line is given in vector form: , where is a position vector of a point on the line and is the direction vector of the line. Any point on this line can be expressed in terms of the parameter .
The plane is given in vector form: , where is the normal vector to the plane and is a constant.
If a point lies on both the line and the plane, its position vector must satisfy both equations. By substituting the parametric form of from the line equation into the plane equation, we can find the value of that corresponds to the intersection point.
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Represent a general point on the line:
The given line is .
We can rewrite this by collecting the components:
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This expression gives the position vector of any point on the line for a given value of .
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Substitute this general point into the plane equation:
The equation of the plane is .
For the intersection point, the from the line must satisfy the plane's equation. So, we substitute the expression for from Step 1 into the plane equation:
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Perform the dot product and solve for :
Recall that the dot product of two vectors is . …
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