Equilateral Triangles - Math

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Question

A circle contains 6 copies of a triangle; each joined to the others at the center of the circle, as well as joined to another triangle on the circle’s circumference.

The circumference of the circle is

What is the area of one of the triangles?

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Answer

The radius of the circle is 2, from the equation circumference . Each triangle is the same, and is equilateral, with side length of 2. The area of a triangle

To find the height of this triangle, we must divide it down the centerline, which will make two identical 30-60-90 triangles, each with a base of 1 and a hypotenuse of 2. Since these triangles are both right traingles (they have a 90 degree angle in them), we can use the Pythagorean Theorem to solve their height, which will be identical to the height of the equilateral triangle.

We know that the hypotenuse is 2 so . That's our solution. We know that the base is 1, and if you square 1, you get 1.

Now our formula looks like this: , so we're getting close to finding .

Let's subtract 1 from each side of that equation, in order to make things a bit simpler:

Now let's apply the square root to each side of the equation, in order to change into :

Therefore, the height of our equilateral triangle is

To find the area of our equilateral triangle, we simply have to multiply half the base by the height:

The area of our triangle is

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