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The instantaneous slope of a curve is the slope of that curve at a single point. In calculus, this is called the derivative. It also might be called the line tangent to the curve at a point.

If you imagine an arbitrary curve (just any curve) with two points on it (point P and point Q), the slope between P and Q is the slope of the line connecting those two points. This is called a secant line. If you keep P where it is and slide Q closer and closer to P along the curve, the secant line will change slope as it gets smaller and smaller. When Q gets extremely close to P (so that there is an infinitesimal space between P and Q), then the slope of the secant line approximates the slope at P. When we take the limit of that tiny distance as it approaches zero (meaning we make the space disappear) we get the slope of the curve at P. This is the instantaneous slope or the derivative of the curve at P.

Mathematically, we say that the slope at P = limh→0 [f(x+h) - f(x)]÷h = df/dx, where h is the distance between P and Q, f(x) is the position of P, f(x+h) is the position of Q, and df/dx is the derivative of the curve with respect to x.

The formula above is a specific case where the derivative is in terms of x and we're dealing with two dimensions. In physics, the instantaneous slope (derivative) of a position function is velocity, the derivative of velocity is acceleration, and the derivative of acceleration is jerk.

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Q: What is instantaneous slope?
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