Question

A building is 5 feet tall. the base of the ladder is 8 feet from the building. how tall must a ladder be to reach the top of the building? explain your reasoning.show your work. round to the nearest tenth if necessary.

Answer 1

The ladder must be 9.4 ft to reach the top of the building

Here, we want to get the length of the ladder that will reach the top of the building

Firstly, we need a diagrammatic representation

We have this as;

As we can see, we have a right triangle with the hypotenuse being the length of the ladder

We simply will make use of Pythagoras' theorem which states that the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the two other sides

Thus, we have;

$\begin{gathered} x^2=5^2+8^2 \\ x^2=\text{ 25 + 64} \\ x^2\text{ = 89} \\ x=\text{ }\sqrt[]{89} \\ x\text{ = 9.4 ft} \end{gathered}$