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smc

geometry senior

Problem

A piece of graph paper is folded once so that is matched with , and is matched with . Find .
(A)
(B)
(C)
(D)
Solution
The line of the fold is the perpendicular bisector of the segment that connects and . The point is the image of the point according to this axis. The situation looks as follows. Now, we will compute the coordinates of the point , using the following facts: The triangles and are congruent. * is positive As the triangles and are congruent, their areas are equal. The area of the triangle is of the size of the vector product , and the area of is of the size of . We get that . The equality remains valid if we multiply the vector by any constant. In other words, instead of we can use any vector with the same direction. The axis of symmetry is perpendicular to . Thus its direction is . We get that . Substituting the coordinates and we get . This simplifies to . We just discovered that the coordinates of are . We will now use the second two facts mentioned above to find . We have and therefore . We know that , and . Simplifying, we get the equation . This has exactly one positive root . It follows that , and that .
Final answer
B