SOLUTION: A man has a square garden area with a sidewalk 2 feet wide all around it. If the area of the sidewalk plus garden is 196 square feet, what are the dimensions of the garden area?

Question 54442: A man has a square garden area with a sidewalk 2 feet wide all around it. If the area of the sidewalk plus garden is 196 square feet, what are the dimensions of the garden area?
Answer by funmath(2933) (Show Source): You can put this solution on YOUR website!
First notice that they said that the garden was a square. That tells us that all of the sides are equal. The area of a square is
Let the side of the garden =x
If you were to draw a square with a bigger square extended 2 feet around it, you would see that the bigger square has sides that look like this:
2ft------x-------2ft, so s=2+x+2=x+4 is the side of the bigger square.
The area of the garden and the sidewalk can be found by finding the area of the big square, they told us that was: 196
Your problem to solve is:

+ or - (We can ignore the because that would give you a - dimension.)

x was the side of the garden, so the dimensions of the garden would be:
Happy Calculating!!!
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