Copyright © University of Cambridge. All rights reserved.

'Shear Magic' printed from http://nrich.maths.org/

Show menu

All these triangles have a base of 1 unit and a height of 2 units. We could call them a "family" of triangles.

1 by 2 right angled triangle sheared 1 by 2 right angled triangle more sheared 1 by 2 right angled triangle very sheared 1 by 2 right angled triangle

What are their areas? What do you notice?

Can you generalise to other "families" of triangles?

You may like to use the interactivity below to investigate more triangles

This text is usually replaced by the Flash movie.