Question

A right triangle has a hypotenuse of length 39 and a leg of length 15. What is the length of the other leg? If necessary round your answer to two decimal places.

Answer 1

Hi and welcome to OpenStudy!

Are you familiar with the Pythagorean Theorem?

Answer 2

Pythagorean states that a^2+b^2=c^2. Where a and b are the 2 shorter sides of the triangle and c is the hypotenuse. This only works with right triangles, it helps us find missing sides.

So here they gave us a smaller leg and a hypotenuse so we have:

15^2+b^2=39^2

So first we want to know this:

15^2 = 225 and
39^2=1521 so now what we have is this:

225+b^2=1521 and now we solve for b:

We subtract 225 from each side to get:

b^2=1296 and now we take the square root of both sides to get b:

b=36. So our missing leg is 36.