Mary Jane's Scribepost for November 9, 2010

For today's math class, Mr. Backe assigned each of us a question to do for a scribe post. I was chosen to do number 22 of chapter 2.4 on page 80.


The hypotenuse of an isosceles right triangle has a length of 20 cm. What is the length of each leg of the triangle? Provide your answer to the nearest tenth of a centimetre.

Isosceles Right Triangle: a triangle with two equal side lengths.




Conclusion:


The triangle had a hypotenuse of 20 cm and so what I did was I used the formula c (squared) = a (squared) + a (squared) to get the length of a. Then I took 20 (squared) or 400 and divided it by 2 to get a (squared) by itself. So now we're left with square root of 200 = the square root of a (squared) to get a by itself. We then end up with 14.1 cm (rounded to the nearest tenths place) as the length of a.




Thanks for reading my scribe post. Please feel free to tell me what I did wrong and correct me when you are commenting.