A square is cut along a diagonal and reassembled to form a parallelogram . If , what is the area of the original square, in ?
Solution
Suppose that the original square had side length . We extend and draw a line through perpendicular to , meeting extended at . is a square, since it has three right angles at (which makes it a rectangle) and since (which makes the rectangle a square). Now and . By the Pythagorean Theorem, and so . Therefore, or . The area of the original square is , which equals .
Want a route through all this instead of an archive? The track
puts 2,000 problems in a working order, from AMC 10 level to the IMO shortlist.