Question

A piece of wire is 8 inches long. The wire is cut into 2 pieces and then each piece is bent into a square. Find the length of each piece if the sum of the areas of these squares is to be 2 square inches.

Answer 1

One way to get the sum of the areas to be 2, is to make the area of each square be 1. If you cut the wire exactly in half, you can bend each square so the side length is one. all sides of both squares will be one and the resulting area of each square will also be one making the sum of the two areas 2. Each piece of wire is 4 inches long because we cut the wire exactly in half.