SOLUTION: The hypotenuse of a right triangle is twice as long as one of the legs and 4 inches longer than the other. What are the lengths of the sides of the triangle?

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Question 212968: The hypotenuse of a right triangle is twice as long as one of the legs and 4 inches longer than the other. What are the lengths of the sides of the triangle?
Answer by vleith(2983)   (Show Source): You can put this solution on YOUR website!
Let h be the length of the hypotenuse. Then one side is h/2 and the third side is h-4.
Since it is a right triangle, you know that




Use the quadratic equation to solve
Solved by pluggable solver: SOLVE quadratic equation with variable
Quadratic equation (in our case ) has the following solutons:



For these solutions to exist, the discriminant should not be a negative number.

First, we need to compute the discriminant : .

Discriminant d=768 is greater than zero. That means that there are two solutions: .




Quadratic expression can be factored:

Again, the answer is: 29.856406460551, 2.14359353944898. Here's your graph:


Since one of the answer is too short to make that number -4 positive, the hypotenuse is ~29.85
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