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Subject: Triangles
Name: Tayler
Who are you: Student

One leg of a right triangle is 8 cm. less than the hypotenuse while the other leg is 1 cm. less than the hypotenuse. Find the length of the hypotenuse.

Tayler,

In my diagram I let the length of the hypotenuse be h cm. Since one of the sides has length 8 cm less than the length of the hypotenuse it has length h - 8 cm.

triangle

In a similar way find the length of the third side. Now use Pythagoras' theorem to find a quadratic equation in h which you can solve to find the length of the hypotenuse.

Penny

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