Question

A farmer is planning how to divide his land for planting next year’s crops. A triangular plot of land is left with two known side lengths measuring 500 m and 1,700 m. What could the farmer do next in order to find the area of the plot?

Answer 1

He can either measure the third side length, apply the Pythagorean theorem to find the height of the triangle, and then calculate the area, or he can find the measure of the included angle between the  known side lengths and use trigonometry to express the height of the triangle and then determine the

area of the triangle