Points, Lines, Segments, Angles etc.

Points and Lines

A point is a specific location in space. A point is drawn as a dot. Often we label a point with some letter. We would say "Point A" for instance.

Above you see three points labeled A, B and C.

Lines are something you have seen in Algebra. Straight lines go on infinitely far in both directions. Closely related to the line are rays and line segments.

A ray is what we can think of as "half a line". A ray starts at a given point and then goes of to infinity in one direction.

A line segment is just a small part of a line. It starts at one point and ends at another.

In the picture above we see the difference between a line, a ray and a segment. The line is the figure at the top. As we can see it goes on for ever. The figure in the middle is a ray. It starts at a point and then moves off to the top-right. The line segment is all the way at the bottom.

Example showing several line segments and their labels

We will be using line segments a lot in later sections. We will label segments by recording the endpoints. For example:

In this diagram we see several line segments:

• Segment AP is the line segment connecting A and P. Note that we can also call this segment PA.
• Segment AB (or BA if you like) runs vertically.
• Segment BP is the third segment shown.

AM, MB and MP are also segments. There is also a line in this picture. It is labeled r.

Resources

Ouside source: [Math League: Basic Terms] Click on the link and look at the examples.