brain pickle

[THEINCREDIBLEdork]

Fine effort everyone. There are no tricks. Every line rendered is a straight line, and each component has the same dimensions in the top and bottom figure. The answer is that the top figure is quadrilateral and not a triangle as most people assume. This is easy to find when you calculate the area of each component separately and add them together, no fancy trigonometry required. Although this can be shown with trigonometry as well

Area of a triangle that is 13x5 = 13 * 5 * .5 = 32.5

Area of blue component = (5*2)/2 = 5
Red = 12
Orange + Green = 15

Total area of components = 32

Hmm... this is a hard one to judge because no answer is complete. DDTempest has a great start right from the start but there is some ambiguity in what he's saying. He says that the blue and red triangles don't have the same dimensions, but no shit they don't one is smaller than the other, but I'm giving him the benifit of the doubt and saying he meant they are not "similar triangles." Dent had the right idea but wasn't correct until his second post. Orgazmo posted a great picture but the only reasoning for the hole was the very ambiguous "their hypotenuses don't match." (when I read that I imagined Lenny from Of Mice and Men saying it. Landing Strip expounded on DDtempest's answer by introducing trigonometry, if she would have just went the extra inch and calculated the necessary angle of the red triangle I pry would have given her the prize.

+1 DDTempest (as soon as I can)

[Landing Strip]

Originally Posted by THEINCREDIBLEdork

Landing Strip expounded on DDtempest's answer by introducing trigonometry, if she would have just went the extra inch and calculated the necessary angle of the red triangle I pry would have given her the prize.

+1 DDTempest (as soon as I can)

D'oh!