A35-m tall building casts a shadow. the distance from the top of the building to the tip of the shadow is 38 m . find the length of the shadow. if necessary, round your answer to the nearest tenth.

Hello!

It seems like the building, shadow, and distance between the top of the building to the top of the shadow makes a triangle. It seems as if the shadow and building are two legs, and the tip distance is the hypotenuse.

With this problem we will use the Pythagorean Theorem, where a squared plus b squared equals c squared.

When our hypotenuse represents c, we will subtract rather than add as we already know the length of c. We need to find the length of the shadow, or leg.

We will square the numbers and subtract. Then we will find the square root of our result, giving us our answer.

1444-1225=219
The square root of 219 is about 14.8.

Just to check, let’s plug our a value into the Pythagorean theorem.

219.04+1225= 1444.04
The square root of 1444.04 is about 38, which is the length of our hypotenuse.

The length of the shadow was 14.8 meters long.

I hope this helps!