eli5 why the area under a curve(or any line) is important
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Because that often gives you important information about the system you’re graphing. As a common example, if time is on the x axis then area under the curve is like “the cumulative (y) so far”.
So like
* if you have time on the x axis and income rate on the y axis, the area under the line is the total money you have made.
* if you have time on the x axis and speed on the y axis, the area under the curve is your total distance travelled up until that time
Here’s an actual one from my chemistry Grad School experiments. I was doing a chemical reaction that produced water. The machine told me the rate that water was being produced. I could make a graph of this rate on the y axis and time on the x axis, and the area under that line was the total water produced so far (and water was a product, so from that I could calculate how much of the chemical reaction I was studying had taken place under whatever conditions I was using).
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