Maths Olympiad Prep

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Geometry Difficulty 4.2 AIME Find the answer

Centers of adjacent faces of a unit cube are joined to form a regular octahedron. What is the volume of this octahedron?

Pick one

Solution

We can break the octahedron into two square pyramids by cutting it along a plane perpendicular to one of its internal diagonals.
[asy] import three; real r = 1/2; triple A = (-0.5,1.5,0); size(400); currentprojection=orthographic(1,1/4,1/2); draw((0,0,0)--(1,0,0)--(1,1,0)--(0,1,0)--(0,0,0)^^(0,0,1)--(1,0,1)--(1,1,1)--(0,1,1)--(0,0,1)^^(0,0,0)--(0,0,1)^^(1,0,0)--(1,0,1)^^(0,1,0)--(0,1,1)^^(1,1,0)--(1,1,1),gray(0.8)); draw((0,r,r)--(r,1,r)--(1,r,r)--(r,0,r)--cycle^^(r,r,0)--(0,r,r)--(r,r,1)--(r,1,r)--(r,r,0)--(1,r,r)--(r,r,1)--(r,0,r)--(r,r,0)); draw((0,r,r)+A--(r,1,r)+A--(1,r,r)+A--(r,0,r)+A--cycle^^(0,r,r)+A--(r,r,1)+A--(1,r,r)+A^^(r,1,r)+A--(r,r,1)+A--(r,0,r)+A); [/asy]
The cube has edges of length 1 so all edges of the regular octahedron have length 22\frac{\sqrt{2}}{2}. Then the square base of the pyramid has area (122)2=12\left(\frac{1}{2}\sqrt{2}\right)^2 = \frac{1}{2}.
We also know that the height of the pyramid is half the height of the cube, so it is 12\frac{1}{2}. The volume of a pyramid with base area BB and height hh is A=13BhA=\frac{1}{3}Bh so each of the pyramids has volume 13(12)(12)=112\frac{1}{3}\left(\frac{1}{2}\right)\left(\frac{1}{2}\right) = \frac{1}{12}. The whole octahedron is twice this volume, so 1122=(B) 16\frac{1}{12} \cdot 2 = \boxed{\textbf{(B) }\frac{1}{6}}.

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Source: NuminaMath-1.5, licensed Apache-2.0. Statement and solution reproduced as published; topic and difficulty added by this site.