Nancy and Kevin collect coins. Nancy has x coins. Kevin has 9 coins fewer than five times the number of coins Nancy has. Write a
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The Pythagorean's Theorem for our situation would look like this:
So let's call the short leg s, the long leg l and the hypotenuse h. It appears that all our measurements are based on the measurement of the short leg. The long leg is 4 more than twice the short leg, so that expression is l=2s+4; the hypotenuse measure is 6 more than twice the short leg, so that expression is h=2s+6. And the short leg is just s. Now we can rewrite our formula accordingly:
And of course we have to expand. Doing that will leave us with
Combining like terms we have
Our job now is to get everything on one side of the equals sign and solve for s
That is now a second degree polynomial, a quadratic to be exact, and it can be factored several different ways. The easiest is to figure what 2 numbers add to be -8 and multiply to be -20. Those numbers would be 10 and -2. Since we are figuring out the length of the sides, AND we know that the two things in math that will never EVER be negative are time and distance/length, -2 is not an option. That means that the short side, s, measures 10. The longer side, 2s+4, measures 2(10)+4 which is 24, and the hypotenuse, 2s+6, measures 2(10)+6 which is 26. So there you go!