If the sides of a square is increased by 3cm, the area becomes 64 cm^2. How do you find the length of a side of the original square?

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If the sides of a square is increased by 3cm, the area becomes 64 cm^2. How do you find the length of a side of the original square?

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Answer 1 · 2015-10-06T11:04:31

The original size was $5 c m$ $5 cm$

Explanation:

Let $a$ $a$ be the original side of the square.

We know that if the side is increased by $3$ $3$ the area of the new square is $64 c m^{2}$ $64 cm^2$ . So we can write that:

$a \geq 0$ $a >=0$ because $a$ $a$ is a geometrical dimension and they are never negative.
The area of square with 3 cm longer sides is $64 c m^{2}$ $64 cm^2$ , so we can write ${(a + 3)}^{2} = 64$ $(a+3)^2=64$

Since we are only looking for positive values of $a$ $a$ (because of pt. 1) we can take a square root of both sides of the equation to get: $a + 3 = 8$ $a+3=8$ .
Now after substracting $3$ $3$ from both sides we get the answer: $a = 5$ $a=5$

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If the sides of a square is increased by 3cm, the area becomes 64 cm^2. How do you find the length of a side of the original square?

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Explanation:

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