"Published in Vacaville, California, USA"
The official distance between home plate and second base in a baseball diamond is 120 ft. Find the area of the official ball diamond and the distances between the bases. (The official ball diamond is in the form of a square.)
Solution:
To illustrate the problem, it is better to post and label the picture as follows
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| Photo by Math Principles in Everyday Life |
In this problem, the diagonal of a square is given which is a distance between the home plate and the second base. Since the official ball diamond is a square, then the diagonal bisects the square of side x into two equal isosceles right triangles.
Let x = be the distances between the bases
d = be the distance between home plate and 2nd base
A = be the area of official ball diamond
Apply Pythagorean Theorem in order to solve for the distances between the bases as follows
Finally, the area of official ball diamond is
