Imagine you are standing near a large rectangular pool and your friend asks you how far you think it is from one corner of the pool to the other, the long (diagonal) way. Explain how you could calculate that length (without getting wet) by only measuring the length and width of the pool. Then, make up a length and width (ex. 3 ft. by 4ft... etc.)... and perform the calculations to get the diagonal!

See explanation below.

Step-by-step explanation:

A right triangle is a triangle that has a right angle (90º). In math, the Pythagorean theorem allows us to calculate the length of the sides of a right triangle.

In a right triangle, the legs are the two sides that meet at the 90º angle and the hypotenuse is the side that opposes the right angle. The Pythagorean Theorem tells us that the square of the hypotenuse equals the sum of the squares of the legs. In other words: where c is the hypotenuse and a and b are the legs.

Now, we can use this formula to calculate the diagonal of the pool if we just have the length and the width (these would be the legs of the triangle). We need to measure both the length and the width and then square both of them and sum up the squares: this would give us the square of the diagonal so we will only need to find its quadratic root and we will have the length of the diagonal.

For example, let's say we have a pool that is 3 ft by 4ft, using the formula we have:

Therefore, in this case the diagonal would be 5 ft long.