Find the side length of the checkerboard for the given area. Then, divide the side length of the checkerboard by the number of small squares.
2 inches
Practice makes perfect
We are told that the total area of a checkerboard is 256 square inches and we want to find the side length of one of the small squares. To do this, we first need to find the side length of the checkerboard. Let S be the side length of the checkerboard.
To find S, we will use the formula for the area of a square.
A=S^2
In this formula, A is the area of the checkerboard and S is its side length. Now, we will substitute 256 for A into the formula and solve it for S. Note that in the formula for the area S is squared so we need to take the square root to find its value.
We found that the side length of the checkerboard is 16 inches. Notice that we do not need to take the negative square root because side length cannot be negative. Now, we will count the numbers of small squares on one side of the checkerboard. Let s be the side length of the small square.
From the graph, we can see that there are 8 small squares on one side of the checkerboard. This means we can divide the measure of the checkerboard's side length by 8 to find the side length of one square.
s=16in./8 = 2 in.
We found that the side length of one of the small squares is 2 inches.
