Question

There is a new employee that works for Amazon. The employee must figure out how big the triangular box is, so he can group it correctly with the other boxes. He finds the labels that tell him that the side lengths of the box are 19 inches long, and 16 inches long, but the label for the longest length is missing. What is the length of the missing side?

Answer 1

Without further information, you can't deduce the length of one side of a triangle knowing the other two.

You can only use the inequalities that tell you that the sum of two sides is greater than the remaining one to get

`x+16 > 19 \implies x > 3`

`x + 19 > 16` which is true for all positive x values

`16+19 > x \implies x < 35`

So, knowing only the length of two of the sides, we can only say that the third side is between 3 and 35 inches long.