One leg of a right triangle is 96 inches. How do you find the hypotenuse and the other leg if the length of the hypotenuse exceeds 2.5 times the other leg by 4 inches?
1 Answer
Jan 15, 2016
Use Pythagoras to establish
Explanation:
Let
then the hypotenuse
And we are told the the first leg
We can use Pythagoras' equation
Reordering gives us
Multiply throughout by
Using the quadratic formula
so
We can ignore the negative answer as we re dealing with a real triangle, so the other leg
The hypotenuse