Olympiad Maths Prep

Track / Stage 3 / 73 of 260 #73 of 2000

Problem 73

AMC 10/12, early questions
Algebra Difficulty 3.2 Find the answer

The graph of y=x2+2x15y=x^2+2x-15 intersects the xx-axis at points AA and CC and the yy-axis at point BB. What is tan(ABC)\tan(\angle ABC)?
(A) 17(B) 14(C) 37(D) 12(E) 47\textbf{(A)}\ \frac{1}{7} \qquad \textbf{(B)}\ \frac{1}{4} \qquad \textbf{(C)}\ \frac{3}{7} \qquad \textbf{(D)}\ \frac{1}{2} \qquad \textbf{(E)}\ \frac{4}{7} \qquad

Official solution

First, find A=(5,0)A=(-5,0), B=(0,15)B=(0,-15), and C=(3,0)C=(3,0). Create vectors BA\overrightarrow{BA} and BC.\overrightarrow{BC}. These can be reduced to 1,3\langle -1, 3 \rangle and 1,5\langle 1, 5 \rangle, respectively. Then, we can use the dot product to calculate the cosine of the angle (where θ=ABC\theta=\angle ABC) between them:
\begin{align*} \langle -1, 3 \rangle \cdot \langle 1, 5 \rangle = 15-1 &= \sqrt{10}\sqrt{26}\cos(\theta),\\ \implies \cos (\theta) &= \frac{7}{\sqrt{65}}. \end{align*}
Thus, tan(ABC)=65491=(E) 47.\tan(\angle ABC) = \sqrt{\frac{65}{49}-1}= \boxed{\textbf{(E)}\ \frac{4}{7}}.
~Indiiiigo

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