Question

A 31-m tall building casts a shadow. The distance from the top of the building to the tip of the shadow is 37 m. Find the length of the shadow. If necessary, round your answer to the nearest tenth.

Answer 1

The length of the shadow is about 20.2( rounded to the nearest tenth), because the shadow and the building formed as a triangle, so uses the formula of Pythagorean theorem to solve this problem

Answer 2

if you draw the illustration of the problem, you can see that the building, the shadow, and the length of the shadow  to the tip of the building is forming a right triangle. We can use pythagoreans theorem stating that a^2 + b^2 = c^2. In this case your side b is missing its value. Therefore we can rearrange the equation then it becomes b= √(c^2-a^2 )