The area of the triangular region bounded by the -axis, the -axis and the line with equation is one-quarter of the area of the triangular region bounded by the -axis, the line with equation and the line with equation , where . What is the value of ?
Solution
The line with equation has -intercept -6. Also, the -intercept of occurs when , which gives or which gives . Therefore, the triangle bounded by the -axis, the -axis, and the line with equation has base of length 3 and height of length 6, and so has area . We want the area of the triangle bounded by the -axis, the vertical line with equation , and the line with equation to be 4 times this area, or 36. This means that is to the right of the point , because the new area is larger. In other words, . The base of this triangle has length , and its height is , since the height is measured along the vertical line with equation . Thus, we want or which means . Since , then which gives . Alternatively, we could note that if similar triangles have areas in the ratio then their corresponding lengths are in the ratio or . Since the two triangles in question are similar (both are right-angled and they have equal angles at the point ), the larger triangle has base of length and so .