A triangle with vertices , , and is reflected about the line to create a second triangle. What is the area of the union of the two triangles?
Problem 246
Official solution
Let be at , B be at , and be at . Reflecting over the line , we see that , (as the x-coordinate of B is 8), and . Line can be represented as , so we see that is on line .
We see that if we connect to , we get a line of length (between and ). The area of is equal to .
Now, let the point of intersection between and be . If we can just find the area of and subtract it from , we are done.
We realize that because the diagram is symmetric over , the intersection of lines and should intersect at an x-coordinate of . We know that the slope of is . Thus, we can represent the line going through and as . Plugging in , we find that the y-coordinate of F is . Thus, the height of is . Using the formula for the area of a triangle, the area of is .
To get our final answer, we must subtract this from .