First, create a proportion to evaluate the height of a television.
≈47 inches
Practice makes perfect
We are given that the ratio of the width to the height of an HDTV is 16:9, and the width is 41 inches. We are asked to evaluate the screen size. Our first step will be to find the height of a television, let's call it h. To do this, we can create a proportion using the given ratio.
16/9=41/h
Let's solve this proportion using cross multiplication.
The height of the HDTV is 23.0625 inches. Now, let's look at the picture. Let s represent the screen size in inches.
Since the television screen is rectangular, we can find the screen size using the Pythagorean Theorem. According to this theorem, the sum of the squared legs of a right triangle is equal to its squared hypotenuse.
41^2+23.0625^2=s^2
Let's solve the above equation for s. Notice that, as s is a positive number representing a distance, we will only consider a positive case when taking a square root of s^2.
