document.write( "Question 156868: 4. A customer wants to make a teepee in his backyard for his children. He plans to use lengths of PVC plumbing pipe for the supports on the teepee, and he wants the teepee to be 12 feet across and 8 feet tall . How long should the pieces of PVC plumbing pipe be?
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Algebra.Com's Answer #115662 by Earlsdon(6294) $\"\"$ $\"About$

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If you think in terms of a right triangle, you can \"see\" that the height of the triangle represents the height of the tepee (h = 8ft) and the base of the triangle is half the distance across the base of the tepee (12ft), so this would be 6 ft.
\n" ); document.write( "The PVC supports are represented by the hypotenuse of the right triangle, and we can call this c.
\n" ); document.write( "So, invoking the Pythagorean theorem:
\n" ); document.write( " $\"c%5E2+=+a%5E2%2Bb%5E2\"$ where: a is the height (8ft), b is the base (6ft) and c is the length of the PVC support.
\n" ); document.write( " $\"c%5E2+=+8%5E2%2B6%5E2\"$
\n" ); document.write( " $\"c%5E2+=+64%2B36\"$
\n" ); document.write( " $\"c%5E2+=+100\"$ Take the square root of both sides.
\n" ); document.write( " $\"c+=+10\"$ or $\"c+=+-10\"$ Discard the negative solution as length is a positive quabntity.
\n" ); document.write( "The PVC supports are 10 feet long. \n" ); document.write( "

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