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Line WY is a Tangent. Find WY. It's a right triangle inside a circle..any help?

Line WY is a Tangent. Find WY. It's a right triangle inside a circle..any help?-example-1
User Ebneter
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2 Answers

5 votes
I don't have answer for this but I  m seeing you not answering a lot of stuff,you should start lessening :) 
User Vandroiy
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4 votes
For this question, you can do Pythagorean Theorem to solve WY. Since WY is tangent to the circle, we know that the triangle is a right triangle.

We know one leg is 9 and the other leg, WY is unknown. But, we do know the hypotenuse.

XY is 6 but PX is unknown. If you think about it, PX is a radius of the circle and we know that the radius is 9 since PW is also a radius of the circle. So, the hypotenuse is 6 + 9 = 15.

We know one leg is 9 and the hypotenuse is 15. We need to find the other leg and we can.

Pythagorean Theorem states that

a^2 + b^2 = c^2 where a and b are the sides of the triangle and where c is the hypotenuse. Using basic algebra, we can alter the equation to find a leg using the hypotenuse and one other leg.

c^2 - b^2 = a^2

All I did was solve for one leg and it doesn't matter what leg you solve for. Let's plug in the numbers.

15^2 - 9^2 = a^2
225 - 81 = a^2
144 = a^2
Take the square root on both sides to get "a" by itself with raising it to the second power.

12 = a

So, the last leg is 12. Hope this helped and good luck!
User Carljohan
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