Dedi has a rectangular pool in his backyard. The surface area of the pool in 30m^2 and the width is 5m.
There are 4 lights, equally spaced along each of the longer sides of the pool, including a light at each corner.
What is the shortest distance between two lights?
I tried doing 6 as the length (30 as SA / 5 as Width) divided by 4 lights, which = 1.5m but that is not the answer. The answer is 2m. Please help, thanks.
you are correct that there are 4 lights. But that means one at each end, and two in the middle. There are only three spaces between lights, of 2m each.
It's always better to draw a diagram, and this would have been clear.
Yeah, my bad. Thanks a lot!
To find the shortest distance between two lights, we need to calculate the length of the longer side of the pool first.
Given:
Surface Area (SA) = 30m^2
Width = 5m
The formula to calculate the surface area of a rectangle is SA = Length * Width. In this case, we have the value of the surface area and the width. Thus, we can rearrange the formula to find the length:
Length = SA / Width = 30m^2 / 5m = 6m
Now that we have the length of the pool, we need to determine the distance between two lights. There are a total of 4 lights along each longer side of the pool, including a light at each corner. To calculate the distance between two lights, we divide the length of the pool by the number of spaces between the lights (which is 3, since there are 4 lights).
Distance between two lights = Length / (Number of spaces between lights) = 6m / 3 = 2m
Therefore, the shortest distance between two lights is 2m, not 1.5m as you initially calculated.