Area of a Triangle

Link of the Day

Once again we return to History.com's "This Day in History". On June 2nd, 1935 Babe Ruth retired from baseball. The "Sultan of Swat" set numerous records and led the Yankees to 4 World Series victories. His carrier slugging average of .690 is still the highest in Major League history. Babe Ruth could make an Excellent Example illustrating the importance of dedication to the things one is passionate about.

6/2 Area of a Triangle

Read the following SAT test question and then click on a button to select your answer. 

What is the area of the triangle in the figure above?

As always, the first step is to read the problem carefully and identify the bottom line. We are looking for the area of the triangle above and we can use the fact that it has been drawn on the coordinate plane to figure out the base and the height. Remember that since there is nothing on the drawing that says "figure not drawn to scale", the figure must be drawn to scale. That means that we could "eyeball" it if we needed to. In this case we can see that the triangles height is 3 and the base is 5. All that we need to solve the problem is the formula for the area of a triangle.

We simply plug in our values for h and b to get




We now look at the answer choices below to see which one matches our prediction.

(A) 
(B) 
(C) 
(D) 
(E) 

The correct answer choice is (B).

On sat.collegeboard.com 70% of the responses were correct.

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