2003 AMC 12A Problems/Problem 17
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[hide]Problem
Square has sides of length , and is the midpoint of . A circle with radius and center intersects a circle with radius and center at points and . What is the distance from to ?
Solution
Let be the origin. is the point and is the point . We are given the radius of the quarter circle and semicircle as and , respectively, so their equations, respectively, are:
Algebraically manipulating the second equation gives:
Substituting this back into the first equation:
Solving each factor for 0 yields . The first value of is obviously referring to the x-coordinate of the point where the circles intersect at the origin, , so the second value must be referring to the x coordinate of . Since is the y-axis, the distance to it from is the same as the x-value of the coordinate of , so the distance from to is
Solution 2
Note that is merely a reflection of over . Call the intersection of and . Drop perpendiculars from and to , and denote their respective points of intersection by and . We then have , with a scale factor of 2. Thus, we can find and double it to get our answer. With some analytical geometry, we find that , implying that .