Anacleto has just finished eating a chocolate bar, and starts playing with the wrapper it was wrapped in, a rectangle with sides and . He decides to make a single straight fold so that, once the paper is folded, a vertex of the rectangle lands exactly at the midpoint of the short side of which it is not an endpoint. How many millimeters is the length of the fold?
Solution
Solution:
The answer is 325. Let be the rectangle that makes up the chocolate wrapper; suppose that has length and that Anacleto makes point coincide with the midpoint of side , which we will call . To do this he must fold along the perpendicular bisector of segment , which intersects sides and respectively at points and ; what the problem asks for is the length of segment . Let be the intersection of and , and the projection of onto . Triangle is similar to triangle : both are right triangles, and angle is congruent to angle (this is because it is supplementary to angle , which in turn, in order for the sum of the interior angles of to be , since and are right angles, must be supplementary to ). We thus have the similarity . The length of is , that of (equal to that of ) is , and that of turns out, by the Pythagorean theorem, to be (in millimeters) .
We thus obtain the length in millimeters of : .