SOLUTION: Joel is laying pipe for a sprinkler system before he plants his lawn. The lawn is a rectangle, 15 feet long and 8 feet wide. He needs to lay a piece of pipe that will be run along
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-> SOLUTION: Joel is laying pipe for a sprinkler system before he plants his lawn. The lawn is a rectangle, 15 feet long and 8 feet wide. He needs to lay a piece of pipe that will be run along
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Question 701394: Joel is laying pipe for a sprinkler system before he plants his lawn. The lawn is a rectangle, 15 feet long and 8 feet wide. He needs to lay a piece of pipe that will be run along the diagonal of the lawn. It will divide the area of the lawn into two right triangles. What will be the length of that diagonal piece of pipe?
You can put this solution on YOUR website! To find missing side lengths in right triangles we use Pythagoras' Theorem which is
where a and b are the lengths of the short sides of the triangle and c is the length of the longest side of the triangle, (this is called the hypotenuse)
So a=8 and b=15. Putting those numbers into the equation gives
working out the numbers gives i.e.
because we need to find what c is, we need to take the square root of 289
Therefore c = 17.
the pipe needs to be 17 ft long.
