The workers laid a floor of size () with two types of tiles: and . It turned out that they were able to completely lay the floor so that the same number of tiles of each type was used. For which could this happen? (You can’t cut tiles and also put them on top of each other.)
Solution
To solve this problem, we aim to find all integer values of (where ) for which an floor can be completely covered using the same number of and tiles. We cannot cut the tiles and they should not overlap.
First, we calculate the total area of the floor, which is .
### Step 1: Calculating Areas
The area covered by a single tile is:
The area covered by a single tile is:
### Step 2: Setting up Equations
Let be the number of tiles and be the number of tiles. According to the problem, .
The total area covered by the tiles should equal the area of the floor:
Since , we substitute to get:
Thus,
For to be an integer, must be divisible by 9. This means that must be a multiple of 3.
### Step 3: Identifying Values of
We are given . Within this range, the multiples of 3 are:
We will verify that each value of gives as an integer:
- For :
- For :
- For :
In each case, is an integer, confirming that the floor can be completely covered with equal numbers of and tiles.
### Final Answer
Therefore, the possible values of for which the floor can be laid are: