2014 AMC 12B Problems/Problem 21
Contents
[hide]Problem 21
In the figure, is a square of side length . The rectangles and are congruent. What is ?
Solution 1
Draw the attitude from to and call the foot . Then . Consider . It is the hypotenuse of both right triangles and , and we know and , so we must have .
Notice that all four triangles in this picture are similar and thus we have . This means is the midpoint of . So , along with all other similar triangles in the picture, is a 30-60-90 triangle, and we have and subsequently . This means , which gives , so the answer is .
Solution 2
Let . Let . Because and , are all similar. Using proportions and the pythagorean theorem, we find Because we know that , we can set up a systems of equations Solving for in the second equation, we get Plugging this into the first equation, we get Plugging into the previous equation with , we get
Solution 3
Let , , and . Then and because and , . Furthermore, the area of the four triangles and the two rectangles sums to 1:
By the Pythagorean theorem:
Then by the rational root theorem, this has roots , , and . The first and last roots are extraneous because they imply and , respectively, thus .
See also
2014 AMC 12B (Problems • Answer Key • Resources) | |
Preceded by Problem 20 |
Followed by Problem 22 |
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