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regular polygons
Great tub choice!
Your pick of the six-sided hot tub has stirred up
excitement among all the bands booked for the
festival—they think it’s gonna be amazing. And you
didn’t even have to do any more math to choose the
hexagon tub, since you already found that handy trend.
The carpenters
want this
internal angle.
We know we can divide the hexagon tub into six congruent
triangles. From this, can you find:
1) The total of all the angles of those “sector” triangles.
2) The angle that the carpenters need to build the wood
frame for the hot tub: the internal angle of the polygon.
Yeah—great, except that the
carpenter wants the dimensions and
angles of this fantasy six-sided tub
that you’ve picked. Please don’t tell me
that chopping it up into triangles is
going to find those as well....
Actually, it might.
It’s not a bad suggestion at all. We have plenty of triangle-
related tools in our toolbox, so when we’re faced with a
problem we can’t already solve, looking for ways to make it
about triangles is a great starting point. Let’s give it a go.
A handy
hexagon to
doodle on