A 25 foot ladder is propped against the side of a building. The bottom of the ladder is 7 feet from the base of the wall. If the top of the ladder slides down 4 feet, how far does the bottom slide out?
1 Answer
See a solution process below:
Explanation:
In this problem we have this situation:
We can find how far up the wall the ladder is using the Pythagorean Theorem.
We now know the ladder is 24 feet up the wall. If the top of the ladder slides down 4 feet it will be 20 feet up the wall and we will have this situation:
We can again use the Pythagorean Theorem to solve for
The ladder is now 15 feet away from the wall. It was originally 7 feet away from the wall.
Therefore the ladder slid 8 feet further away from the wall when it slid 4 feet down the wall.