Vertical asymptotes occur where the function blows up. In rational functions, this can only happen when the denominator goes to 0. In our case, the denominator is 0 when x=3, and in this case the numerator is 147. That means that as x gets closer and closer to 3, the numerator gets closer and closer to 147 while the denominator gets closer and closer to 0, so ∣f(x)∣ grows without bound. That is, there is a vertical asymptote at x=3.
The horizontal asymptotes are found by taking the limits as x goes to infinity and negative infinity. In our case, they are the same, so we condense our work.
x→±∞lim3x3−81x(2x+1)(x−7)where a, b, ad c are some constants. Remember, for rational functions, you can figure out the end behaviour by looking only at the terms with the highest degree–the others won’t matter, so we don’t bother finding them. From here, we divide the numerator and denominator by the highest power of x in the denominator, x3.=x→±∞lim3x3−812x3+ax2+bx+c=x→±∞lim3x3−812x3+ax2+bx+c(x31x31)=x→±∞lim3−x3812+xa+x2b+x3c=3−02+0+0+0=32
So there is a horizontal asymptote of y=32 both as x→∞ and as x→−∞.