SOLUTION: if a rectangle has an area of 100 and 1 side is 2 feet longer then the other what are the length of the second side?

Question 4756: if a rectangle has an area of 100 and 1 side is 2 feet longer then the other what are the length of the second side?
Answer by longjonsilver(2297) (Show Source): You can put this solution on YOUR website!
Let shorter length = x
so longer length = x+2

Area of rectangle is x(x+2) = 100, so we get . This does not factorise easily, so use the quadratic formula or complete the square (basically the same thing)...

--> are you OK that this is the same as the previous line?. The reason for adding the 1 is that the lefthand side can now be factorised nicely to (x+1)^2, so:

so now we can take square root of both sides, remembering there are 2 answers:

or

so --ignore the other answer as this is physically not correct for a length.

Longer side is -->

you can check your answer by multiplying by to see if they equal 100.

jon.

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