Question

How do you determine if polygons are similar?

Answer 1

Recall that two shapes are congruent if they have the same shape and size. When two shapes have the same shape but different sizes, we call the shapes similar. You can also think of similar objects or shapes as scaled versions of each other.

Example: Toys cars and airplanes that are scaled down versions of the real objects. In this section we will just concentrate on similar polygons.

Recall that a polygon is a closed shape consisting of a finite number of line segments that do not cross each other.

Polygons whose corresponding angles are congruent and whose corresponding sides are proportional are called similar polygons.

Scale factor: If two polygons are similar, then the ratio of the lengths of the two corresponding sides is the scale factor.

The scale factor=k in the above example is determined the following way:

2*k=4, so k=2.

Now we will have the same relationship between the other two sides:

2*k=3, so k=2.

hope this helped :)