An isosceles triangle has a base of 12 cm with equal sides of 20 cm each. How do you determine the area of this triangle accurate to the nearest square centimeter?
1 Answer
See a solution process below:
Explanation:
The formula for the area of a triangle is:
The base of this isosceles triangle is given as 12cm.
Because the line which bisects and isosceles triangles is at a right angle to the base we can use the Pythagorean Theorem to find the height.
The Pythagorean Theorem states:
Where:
In this problem, the hypotenuse, or
One side of the right triangle is the height which we need to solve for.
The other side of the right triangle for this isosceles triangle is
Substituting and solving for
Therefore the height is approximately: 19.08cm
We can now substitute into the formula for the area to determine the area of this triangle: