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Hummer

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Feb 3, 2006
1,012
0
Queens, New York NY-5
My teacher gave us this as a brain teaser. No one got it in class. I've tried everything I could think of and I still can't get it. It really looks easy, but the answers I keep getting are all irrational.
 

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I actually got that, putting it into my calc. I thought it was wrong because of it being irrational. I expected a nice clean number. Thanks a lot though.
 
Hummer - don't fret about it. It was probably given as an exercise just to see how well you trusted your work. I can imagine many different answers coming out of this, but also people re-doing it when they came up the the 610.something, thinking that must be wrong - as you may have by expecting something nice and clean. You where looking for that before you ever started! Also, it's not an irrational number for an answer in math sense, but in people thinking sense it is.

I do like the other method - breaking it down first and doing it steps. Very elegant and thinking outside the box!
 
11th. I was taught this stuff a long time ago and I forgot about it. I'm a bit sad I'm in regular math when pre calc is learning what I learned last year.


I'm in 11th too (but taking AP Calc). Did she specify if she wanted a simplified answer or a irrational answer? I know a lot of times teachers give you something like that and just want you to simplify, but not actually solve, it.
 
Just wanted to put another voice in, I plugged it all into Soulver and got 610.5700451303. And I actually kind of under stood it, and I'm in 9th Grade and Geometry. I hate Geometry.
 
I'm in 11th too (but taking AP Calc). Did she specify if she wanted a simplified answer or a irrational answer? I know a lot of times teachers give you something like that and just want you to simplify, but not actually solve, it.

Well the entire story is we were just going over homework questions and we have a test monday, so we ran out of questions and some idiot in the class is pushing our teacher (male) to make up something off of his head. So our teacher is standing there for 15 minutes on the calculator figuring out a question for us and this is what comes up. He even tells us we can't leave until one person gives him the right answer and no one seemed to. Though there was a bunch of people coming up to him asking him if it was the answer. He then gave us some hints which looked like the simplifying HexMonkey did. No one still got it, so he told us we could leave and that the first five people to come to him with the answer gets extra credit.
 
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