Area gets scarier ... the solution.

The poll offered 1/4, 1/3, 1/2 and ‘no enough info’ as your options.

For most of the day, your responses have hovered around 40% each for 1/4 and 1/3. About one in six people plumping for 1/2 and about one in twelve voting that there is enough information to answer the question.

I love a poll that splits the nation!!!

Let’s go.

This puzzle has a couple of misdirections inbuilt.

Misdirection one: The scale of the rectangle is 10:30 or 1:3. That may lean you towards the answer 1/3. In fact, the scale of the rectangle does not matter!

Misdirection two: While we know the 10cm height and 30cm length of the rectangle, we don’t know the comparative sizes of the triangles. This may lean you towards ‘no enough info’. In fact, the comparative sizes of the triangles does not matter!

All you need to know to bust this open is the formula for area of a triangle that you learned towards the end of primary school or maybe first year high school.

The height of each of the four triangles is 5cm (up or down it doesn’t matter).

We don’t know the length of the base of any triangle. But when we add them all up, they cover the full 30cm of the rectangle.

So the total area is 1/2 x 5 x 30 = 75 square cm.

Which is clearly 1/4 of the total area.

Congratulations to all of those who got this correct.

Have a great weekend.