College Calculus: Level I Approximating Areas and Distances

In this video we are going to talk about Approximating Areas and Distances. With this lesson we are moving towards Definite Integral. First, we are going to take a look at three rectangular approximations for the area under the curve between x=a and x=b. These approximations will consist of summing up areas of a collection of rectangles, and we will be deciding how high to make each rectangle by using Right Endpoint, Left Endpoint or Midpoint. Basically, we will be dividing our interval into n equal length parts. Those parts would describe the base of our rectangles. This is easier to understand by illustrating it because this is very “graphical” topic and we will do so in our examples.