Question

What is the first step to finding the critical points of a function?

Answer 1

There are basically two way to be a critical value `c`: 1. `f'(c)=0`
or 2. `f'(c)` is undefined.

The first step to find a critical value is to find the derivative `f'(x)` then set it equal to `0` to see if you can find its zeros, which are critical values of `f`. The second step is to find x-values that make `f'(x)` undefined if any.