Exercise 69 Page 659

We are given that the area of a right triangle is 240 square inches and the base is 30 inches long. Let x and y represent the missing sides.

Let's recall that in a right triangle the area is half of the product of the lengths of its legs. 240=1/2* 30* xWe can solve the above equation for x.

The second leg has a length of 16 inches long. Let x and y represent the missing sides.

Next we can evaluate the length of the hypotenuse y using the Pythagorean Theorem. Recall that, according to this theorem, the sum of the squared legs of a right triangle is equal to its squared hypotenuse. 30^2+ 16^2= y^2 Let's solve the equation. Notice that, since y represents the side length, we will consider only the positive case when taking a square root of y^2.

The length of the hypotenuse of this triangle is 34. This corresponds with answer E.