Maths Olympiad Prep

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, 2008

Geometry Difficulty 5.4 AIME, harder Prove it Slovenia

In a quadrilateral ABCDABCD let KK be a point inside the triangle ABDABD such that triangles ABDABD and KCDKCD are similar. Prove that triangles BCDBCD and AKDAKD are similar as well.

Solution

Since triangles ABDABD and KCDKCD are similar, we have ADB=KDC\angle ADB = \angle KDC and DADB=DKDC\frac{|DA|}{|DB|} = \frac{|DK|}{|DC|}. We see that
ADK=ADBBDK==KDCBDK=BDC \angle ADK = \angle ADB - \angle BDK = \\ = \angle KDC - \angle BDK = \angle BDC
and since DADK=DBDC\frac{|DA|}{|DK|} = \frac{|DB|}{|DC|}, we conclude that triangles ADKADK and DBCDBC are also similar (matching in one angle and the ratio of the two adjacent sides).

Figure 1

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