this post was submitted on 10 May 2024
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An 8x5 rectangle. If the bottom left corner is considered (0, 0), then two lines are drawn within the rectangle, from (0, 4) to (8, 1) and from (1, 5) to (7, 0). The smaller two regions of the four these lines cut the rectangle into are shaded. What is their combined area?

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[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Huh. I got 7.5 square units. Now I'm rechecking my calculations frantically. Lol.

I guess there's no rule against posting your work.

I divided it in half down the middle and made a note to double my answer at the end.

The whole half rectangle has an area of 20. The trapezoid below has an area of (2.5+4)*4/2=13. The triangle above has an area of 3*2.5/2=3.25. 20-13-3.25=3.75. Multiplying that by 2 (because that 3.75 is only the area of the top left half of the shaded portion) gives 7.5.

Edit: Bah! Never mind. Found my mistake. 3*2.5/2=3.75, not 3.25. With that fix I get 6.5.

[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Posting work is encouraged ๐Ÿ™‚

You've got it, it's 6.5. I actually posted this problem because I originally found the answer using trig, which seemed a bit too brute-force-y, especially considering the original source for this problem - I wanted to see if others could/would find the simpler solution that I assumed existed. And you did ^_^

[โ€“] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I tried it just using the area of a kite, but ended up with sqrt(2)*sqrt(22.25) and got ~6.67 I made a mistake somewhere I guess.

[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago (2 children)

The issue there is it isn't a kite: The two longer sides don't have equal length - they're sqrt(73)/2 and sqrt(61)/2. So it's a decent approximation but not quite exact.

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

Oh jeez. Of course. Thanks.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

One doesn't really see this if the image is oriented like that. Rotating your phone or your head so that the vertical axis matches the long diagonal of the 'kite' makes this difference more obvious.