Question

What is the area of an isosceles triangle with a base of 6 and sides of 4? units are in meters?

Answer 1

Area of a triangle is `1/2xxbasexxheight`

If we divide the isosceles triangle down the middle into two triangles, then they will be right angled triangles with sides `3`, `4`, and the height of the isosceles triangle.

Unfortunately, this isn't a `3`, `4`, `5`, triangle as it's the hypotenuse that is of length `4`. We can still use Pythagoras to calculate:

height `=sqrt(4^2-3^2)=sqrt(7)`

So the area of the triangle is

`1/2xxbasexxheight = 1/2*6*sqrt(7) = 3sqrt(7) ~= 7.94 m^2`