A 1 metre cube has one face on the ground and one face against a wall. A 4 metre ladder leans against the wall and just touches the cube. How high is the top of the ladder above the ground?
Straight lines are drawn from each corner of a square to the mid points of the opposite sides. Express the area of the octagon that is formed at the centre as a fraction of the area of the square.
Two cyclists, practising on a track, pass each other at the starting line and go at constant speeds... Can you find lap times that are such that the cyclists will meet exactly half way round the track.
Patrick from Woodbridge School offered the following insight to this problem, as did Chip from King's Ely School.
An anonymous solver also wrote:
The long thin parallelogram occurs because the slopes of the trapezia are not the same as explained by Patrick and Chip: the slopes of the triangles. For each trapezium the slope is in the ratio of 2 up to 5 across and for each triangle the slope is in the ratio of 3 up to 8 across.
Finally, Susie from DEECD Victoria offered an example of other numbers that work (Do they have the same properties as the numbers used for the lengths in the problem?). She said: