Competition problem — Geometry — Maths Olympiad Prep

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Geometry Difficulty 3.3 AMC 10/12 Find the answer

The line segment formed by $A(1, 2)$ and $B(3, 3)$ is rotated to the line segment formed by $A'(3, 1)$ and $B'(4, 3)$ about the point $P(r, s)$ . What is $|r-s|$ ?

Pick one

Solution

Due to rotations preserving an equal distance, we can bash the answer with the distance formula. $D(A, P) = D(A', P)$ , and $D(B, P) = D(B',P)$ .
Thus we will square our equations to yield:
$(1-r)^2+(2-s)^2=(3-r)^2+(1-s)^2$ , and $(3-r)^2+(3-s)^2=(4-r)^2+(3-s)^2$ .
Canceling $(3-s)^2$ from the second equation makes it clear that $r$ equals $3.5$ .
Substituting will yield
\begin{align*}(2.5)^2+(2-s)^2 &= (-0.5)^2+(1-s)^2 \\ 6.25+4-4s+s^2 &= 0.25+1-2s+s^2 \\ 2s &= 9 \\ s &=4.5 \\ \end{align*}.
Now $|r-s| = |3.5-4.5| = \boxed{\textbf{(E) } 1}$ .
-Antifreeze5420

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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.