Maths Olympiad Prep

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Geometry Difficulty 6.8 National Olympiad Prove it Italy

Anacleto has just finished eating a chocolate bar, and starts playing with the wrapper it was wrapped in, a rectangle with sides 360 mm360~\mathrm{mm} and 300 mm300~\mathrm{mm}. 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 ABCDABCD be the rectangle that makes up the chocolate wrapper; suppose that ABAB has length 360 mm360~\mathrm{mm} and that Anacleto makes point AA coincide with the midpoint of side BCBC, which we will call MM. To do this he must fold along the perpendicular bisector of segment AMAM, which intersects sides ABAB and CDCD respectively at points SS and TT; what the problem asks for is the length of segment STST. Let KK be the intersection of STST and AMAM, and HH the projection of TT onto ABAB. Triangle THSTHS is similar to triangle ABMABM: both are right triangles, and angle TSATSA is congruent to angle AMBAMB (this is because it is supplementary to angle TSBTSB, which in turn, in order for the sum of the interior angles of SBMKSBMK to be 360360^\circ, since SBMSBM and MKSMKS are right angles, must be supplementary to AMBAMB). We thus have the similarity TH:TS=AB:AMTH : TS = AB : AM. The length of ABAB is 360 mm360~\mathrm{mm}, that of THTH (equal to that of ADAD) is 300 mm300~\mathrm{mm}, and that of AMAM turns out, by the Pythagorean theorem, to be (in millimeters) AB2+AM2=3602+1502=30144+25=3013\sqrt{AB^2 + AM^2} = \sqrt{360^2 + 150^2} = 30 \sqrt{144 + 25} = 30 \cdot 13.

We thus obtain the length in millimeters of TSTS: TS=AMTHAB=3013300360=325TS = \frac{AM \cdot TH}{AB} = \frac{30 \cdot 13 \cdot 300}{360} = 325.

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Source: MathNet, licensed CC-BY-4.0. Statement translated into English from it; metadata (topic, difficulty) added by this project.