SOLUTION: Liz is flying a kite. she let out 80 ft of string and attached the string to a stake in the ground, the kite is now directly above her brother mike who is 32 ft away from liz. find

Question 193132: Liz is flying a kite. she let out 80 ft of string and attached the string to a stake in the ground, the kite is now directly above her brother mike who is 32 ft away from liz. find the height of the kite to the nearest foot.

Answer by jim_thompson5910(35256) (Show Source): You can put this solution on YOUR website!

First, let's draw a picture:

We can see that a triangle forms where the legs are "x" and 32 ft with a hypotenuse of 80 ft. To find the unknown length of the leg "x", we need to use the Pythagorean Theorem

Remember, the Pythagorean Theorem is where "a" and "b" are the legs of a triangle and "c" is the hypotenuse.

Since the legs are and this means that and

Also, since the hypotenuse is , this means that .

Start with the Pythagorean theorem.

Plug in , ,

Square to get .

Square to get .

Subtract from both sides.

Combine like terms.

Take the square root of both sides. Note: only the positive square root is considered (since a negative length doesn't make sense).

Evaluate the square root (using a calculator). Note: this value is approximate

Now round to the nearest whole number to get

So the kite is about 73 ft above Mike's head.

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