Question

A student thinks that the regular pentagon in the diagram

has 10 lines of symmetry. Explain the student's error.

Answer 1

A

Explanation:

The student must have thought that every single arrowhead is a line of symmetry, so since there are 10 arrowheads, there must be 10 lines of symmetry. This is incorrect because if you look closely at the diagram, each line has 2 arrowheads, so the student is overcounting by a factor of 2. They should have just counted the number of lines, not arrowheads. Therefore, there must be 10/2 = 5 lines of symmetry, not 10. Hope this helps!