Question

A 40 foot ladder is set against the side of a house so that it reaches up 24 feet.
If Lily grabs the ladder at its base and pulls it 4 feet farther from the house,
how far up the side of the house will the ladder reach now? (The answer is not
20 ft.) Round to the nearest tenth of a foot.

Answer 1

Answer:

17.4 ft

Step-by-step explanation:

First, you need to calculate how far away the latter was from the wall originally. To do this, we would use the Pythagorean Theorem. We know that the hypotenuse, the longest side of the triangle, is 40 feet. We also know that the height is 24 feet. So we plug it into the equation to get:  $24^{2} +b^{2} =40^{2}$. Once we simplify it, we get 576+ $b^{2}$=1600. Then we subtract 576 from both side and we get 1024. We square root that to get 32. We know after that, we move it 4 feet away from the wall. We do the same process again but replace 24 squared with 36 squared, 4 away from the previous length, and we end up with 17.4 ft.