Distance Between Telephone Poles
Date: 15 Apr 1995 00:10:39 -0400 From: Steven Boynes Subject: Math Problem! SWAT Team: You can answer any question pertaining to mathematics???? Okay, I'm only a High School Student so don't expect anything to challenging. I'm currently in Algebra II/Trigonometry Honors. Here's a few questions for you guys: 1. Do you have any challenging brain teasers??? I'd love to get a hold of a bunch so I could rev up my brain for the SAT's. 2. Do you know of any GOOD graphing programs that do math problems (e.g.-parabolas, hyperbolas, etc.) 3. Ok..Here's the real Math Problem: If you have 6 equally spaced telephone poles, and the distance between the first and sixth telephone pole is 1260 feet, what is the distance between the first and fourth telephone poles??? Thanks for your Help!!!
Date: 15 Apr 1995 13:13:02 -0400 From: Dr. Ken Subject: Re: Math Problem! Hello there! When I took the SAT's, I found that the best preparation was to simply get my hands on a bunch of old SAT tests (as long as they're not too old, because the style of test evolves over time) and practice going through them. You may find that the math section isn't as hard as you think it's going to be; a lot of points are lost simply because people don't know the style of the test well, or they get all nervous and anxious during the test and choke. So that's what I'd recommend. If you're interested in puzzles, check out the newsgroups rec.puzzles and geometry.puzzles. They're pretty good. As for good graphing programs, there's a great program called Mathematica that does a whole bunch of math, including graphing functions. If you have access to the World Wide Web, you can look at the site http://www.math.fsu.edu/Science/Software.html or http://mathforum.org/ for other information. Now for the math problem: Well, let's assign the variable x to the distance between any two adjacent poles. Then the distance between the first and the sixth poles is 5x. So that gives us the equation 5x = 1260. Once we solve for x, we can find out the distance between the first and fourth poles by finding out what 3x is. I hope this helps! -Ken "Dr." Math
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