The College Entrance Examination Board was founded in 1899 by 12 university and three high - school preparatory academy . Before it innovate the Standardized Aptitude Test in 1926 , the examination looked at students ’ knowledge in multiple subjects such as Botany , Chemistry , English , French , German , Greek , History , Latin , Mathematics , Physics , Zoology .
The National Museum of American History has in its collection copy of the College Entrance Exams and we were particularly intrigued by theMathematics questionsfrom 1904 , where 115 years of advances in educations do n’t give us too much advantage over the scholarly person that sat the existent examination in the past .
interrogative sentence 3part b reads : “ The sides of a pentagon are respectively 4,5,6,7 and 8 centimeters . encounter the sides of a like polygon whose area equals four times the area of the give polygonal shape . ”
standardised polygons are shapes made of multiple sides in which each corresponding sides are proportional .
Do you imagine you may work out it ? Our solution after this break .
This Week in IFLScience
Our solvent – There are several ways to work out what the side of the bigger maverick pentagon are . We are looking for the shell divisor , the number we want to multiply each side by to get the decent big pentagon . In this case , a pentagon with an orbit four metre as liberal .
As we enjoin there are many way to get to the correct solution , but we give-up the ghost for something that was brassy and easy . Mostly we went with what we commend from geometry in schoolhouse and it is not too much .
We manufacture our Pentagon with a ripe slant between the side of length four and the side of length five . If we link up the two we have a gracious easy triangle whose area we can well calculate ( base times height divided by two ) . So the area of that triangle is 10 . In our bigger irregular pentagon , the same orbit needs to be 4 times bigger . This tells us that each side necessitate to be double as farsighted . Our scale leaf ingredient is 2 .
So the sides of the larger pentagon are severally 8 , 10 , 12 , 14 , and 16 cm .
