Your friend is trying to calculate the height of a nearby oak tree. You tell him that you learned how to use similar triangles in Geometry class. You tell your friend to measure his height (75 inches) and you measure the length of his shadow (48 inches). Both of you measure the length of the tree’s shadow (38 feet). How tall is the tree (in feet)? Round to the nearest hundredth.

Question

anonymous · Answer

Use fractions to find your answer, putting corresponding sides into fractions.

friend's height over friend's shadow = tree's height over tree's shadow.
or height/shadow = height of tree/shadow of tree.

Plug in the values and do cross multiplication.