Quadratic word problem of the day!
By: Kendra Kendall and Brittany Valdez
Word problem
A zoo is planning on building a new polar bear exhibit. The area of the exhibit is 35,000 square feet. They are planning on putting a walkway around the exhibit of constant width. The dimensions of the exhibit with the walkway are 150 ft by 800ft. Find the length and width of the exhibit.
Explanation
Step 1: because the walkway has an equal width, we represented it by the variable x. Then to find the width of the entire thing we did 150+x+x. And then for the length did the same 800+x+x. Because we are trying to find the inside dimensions of the inside the formula is minus the 2x. We then set it equal to the area of the inside exhibit.
Step 2: we foiled are formula.
Step 3: we then combined the numbers that both had an x. And rearranged the formula to standard formula and moved the 35,000 over and set the formula to 0.
Step 4: we put the formula in the quadratic formula.
Step 5: we solved for the numbers under the square root.
Step 6: we now subtracted the two numbers under the square root.
Step 7: we found the square root of the number.
Step 8: we solved for both subtraction and adding on the problem.
Step 9: we plugged in the number to see if it worked. It did
Step 10: we wrote down the answer to the problem.