McGraw Hill Integrated II, 2012
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McGraw Hill Integrated II, 2012 View details
1. Circles and Circumference
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Exercise 52 Page 722

Given two circles with different radii, can you map one onto the other by performing a similarity transformation?

See solution.

Practice makes perfect

By definition, a circle is the set of all the points in a plane that are equidistant from a fixed point called the center.

A dilation is a transformation that enlarges or reduces the size of a figure. Even though the new image has a different size, it will be similar to the original one. Let's perform a dilation on a circle.
As we can see, by performing a dilation on a circle we can obtain a circle of any radius we want. Therefore, given any two circles we can map one of them into the other by performing a dilation and/or a translation.
Since both translations and dilations are similarity transformations, we have that all circles are similar.