Two circles and with centers and are externally tangent at . Let be a segment tangent to at , and let be the segment tangent to both at with . If has length 80 and has length 90, what is the length of ?
, 2005
Solution
The answer is 48. is a radius of the circle ; since is also one, it too measures 80. Moreover the angle is right; by the Pythagorean theorem then measures . But the triangles and are similar (they are right triangles and share the angle at ), so and measures 102, so that the length of is 48.

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