Areas and Ratios

What is the area of the quadrilateral APOQ? Working on the building blocks will give you some insights that may help you to work it out.

Six Discs

Six circular discs are packed in different-shaped boxes so that the discs touch their neighbours and the sides of the box. Can you put the boxes in order according to the areas of their bases?

Quadarc

Given a square ABCD of sides 10 cm, and using the corners as centres, construct four quadrants with radius 10 cm each inside the square. The four arcs intersect at P, Q, R and S. Find the area enclosed by PQRS.

Unusual Quadrilateral

Stage: 4 Short Challenge Level:
Label the vertices of the quadrilateral $A$, $B$, $C$ and $D$ as shown.

By Pythagoras theorem, $AC^2=AD^2+DC^2=7^2+9^2=130$, so again by Pythagoras, $AB^2=130-BC^2=130-3^2=121$. Therefore $AB=11$cm.

The area of the quadrilateral is the area of the top right angled triangle plus the area of the bottom right angled triangle $=\frac{7\times 9}{2}+\frac{3\times 11}{2}=\frac{63+33}{2}=\frac{96}{2}=48$cm$^2$.

This problem is taken from the UKMT Mathematical Challenges.
View the archive of all weekly problems grouped by curriculum topic

View the previous week's solution
View the current weekly problem