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Math 221 Week 5 Assignment Essay

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Buried Treasure
Ashford University MAT 221

Buried Treasure
For this week’s Assignment we are given a word problem involving buried treasure and the use of the Pythagorean Theorem. We will use many different ways to attempt to factor down the three quadratic expressions which is in this problem. The problem is as, ““Ahmed has half of a treasure map, which indicates that the treasure is buried in the desert 2x + 6 paces from Castle Rock. Vanessa has the other half of the map. Her half indicates that to find the treasure, one must get to Castle Rock, walk x paces to the north, and then walk 2x + 4 paces to the east. If they share their information, then they can find x and save a lot of digging. …show more content…

Running with this information can now write out the equation AB2 + BC2 = AC2. One important thing is that we must note that AB is equal to “X” and the line segment of BC is equal to that of 2x+4, and that AC will be equal to that of 2x+6. So we will now input this information to create (x)2 + (2x + 4)2 = (2x + 6)2 and begin factoring each term into two sections. These two sections will be as x*x + (2x + 4)(2x + 4) = (2x + 6)(2x + 6). x times x is x2. An important tool to use now would be the FOIL method, so we will take (2x + 4)(2x + 4) and create 4x2 + 16x + 16. Right off the bat we notice that we have like terms. So we will add x2 to 4x2 to get 5x2. This will create 5x2 + 16x + 16 = 4x2 + 24x+ 36. Now we will use the subtraction property to get 5x2 – 4x2 + 16x – 24x + 16 – 36 = 0, however we still have like terms, so because 5x2 is a like term with -4x2 we will add them together to get x2. We will also combine 16x and –24x and also 16 and –36 which are also like terms and create –8x and –20, our equation should now look like x2 – 8x -- 20 = 0.We will now factor the equation from left to right, first factoring x2 which has 1 coefficient so the fact will be 1 and -1. The other term will be 20 which have no coefficient so we will do 5x4 and then 4 still can be divided so 2x2. This will create 20=225.

We will now take a look using the Prime Factorization formula which will aid us in finding the number

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