As with most advanced math, if your "real life" involves engineering work, you will use such math; otherwise, you will hardly have anything to do, in this case, with polynomial functions.
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In the real domain, yes. In the complex domain, no.
Yes, but in this case, the coefficients of the polynomial can not all be real.
A power function is of the form xa where a is a real number. A polynomial function is of the form anxn + an-1xn-1 + ... + a1x + a0 for some positive integer n, and all the ai are real constants.
Yes, that's the same thing.
For a polynomial of the form y = p(x) (i.e., some polynomial function of x), having a y-intercept simply means that the polynomial is defined for x = 0 - and a polynomial is defined for any value of "x". As for the x-intercept: from left to right, a polynomial of even degree may come down, not quite reach zero, and then go back up again. A simple example is y = x2 + 1. Why is the situation for "x" and for "y" different? Well, the original equation is a polynomial in "x"; but if you solve for "x", you don't get a polynomial in "y".