SOLUTION: In the Old Weat, settlers often fashioned tents out of a piece of cloth thrown over tent poles and the secures to the ground with stakes forming an isosceles triangle. How long wou

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Question 37385: In the Old Weat, settlers often fashioned tents out of a piece of cloth thrown over tent poles and the secures to the ground with stakes forming an isosceles triangle. How long would the cloth have to be so that the opening of the tent was 4 meters high and 3 meters wide?
Answer by fractalier(6550) About Me  (Show Source):
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Draw an isosceles triangle with base 3m and height 4 m. The idea of the problem is to find the sum of the two legs of the triangle. Each leg is the Pythagorean sum of 1.5 and 4, yielding rad(73) / 2. Two such legs would have a length of the square root of 73 or about 8.54 m.