Question 78058: a rectangular piece of paper has a width of 16 inches and an area of 192 square inches. what is its length?
Answer by bucky(2189)   (Show Source):
You can put this solution on YOUR website! The formula for the area of a rectangle is
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A = L * W
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In which A = area, L = length. And W = width.
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The problem tells you that the Area is 192 square inches and the width is 16 inches. If
you substitute these two values into the equation for the area you get:
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192 = L * 16
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[Note that the units are consistent ... square inches and inches. Therefore, the answer will
be inches.]
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You can now solve for L by dividing both sides by the multiplier of L ... that is, divide
both sides by 16. When you do that you get:
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L = 192/16 = 12 inches
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So the developer of the problem ignored the standard definition of length as far as a rectangle
is concerned. Whoever wrote the problem should have said the length was 16 inches and
asked you to find the width. The width of a rectangle is normally considered to be the
shorter dimension and the length the longer dimension. But if the area of the rectangle
is 192 square inches and one side is 16 inches, the other side has to be 12 inches.
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Hope this helps to "un-confuse" you. I suspect you may have gotten 12 inches for the answer
and thought you were doing something wrong because you expected to get an answer bigger
than 16 inches since you were asked to find the length. Just consider that the writer
of the problem made a mistake in convention by calling the shorter side the length and
the longer side the width.
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