2007 AMC 12B Problems/Problem 20

Problem

The parallelogram bounded by the lines $y=ax+c$ , $y=ax+d$ , $y=bx+c$ , and $y=bx+d$ has area $18$ . The parallelogram bounded by the lines $y=ax+c$ , $y=ax-d$ , $y=bx+c$ , and $y=bx-d$ has area $72$ . Given that $a$ , $b$ , $c$ , and $d$ are positive integers, what is the smallest possible value of $a+b+c+d$ ?

$\mathrm {(A)} 13\qquad \mathrm {(B)} 14\qquad \mathrm {(C)} 15\qquad \mathrm {(D)} 16\qquad \mathrm {(E)} 17$

Solution

Plotting the parallelogram on the coordinate plane, the 4 corners are at $(0,c),(0,d),\left(\frac{d-c}{a-b},\frac{ad-bc}{a-b}\right),\left(\frac{c-d}{a-b},\frac{bc-ad}{a-b}\right)$ . Because $72= 4\cdot 18$ , we have that $4(c-d)\left(\frac{c-d}{a-b}\right) = (c+d)\left(\frac{c+d}{a-b}\right)$ or that $2(c-d)=c+d$ , which gives $c=3d$ (consider a homothety, or dilation, that carries the first parallelogram to the second parallelogram; because the area increases by $4\times$ , it follows that the stretch along the diagonal is $2\times$ ). The area of triangular half of the parallelogram on the right side of the y-axis is given by $9 = \frac{1}{2} (c-d)\left(\frac{d-c}{a-b}\right)$ , so substituting $c = 3d$ :

$\begin{align*} \frac{1}{2} (c-d)\left(\frac{c-d}{a-b}\right) &= 9 \\ 2d^2 &= 9(a-b) \\ \end{align*}$

Thus $3|d$ , and we verify that $d = 3$ , $a-b = 2 \Longrightarrow a = 3, b = 1$ will give us a minimum value for $a+b+c+d$ . Then $a+b+c+d = 3 + 1 + 9 + 3 = 16\ \mathbf{(D)}$ .

2007 AMC 12B (Problems • Answer Key • Resources)
Preceded by Problem 21	Followed by Problem 23
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2007 AMC 12B Problems/Problem 20

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