How to find the perimeter of a pentagon - Math

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Question

An apothem is a line drawn from the center of a regular shape to the center of one of its edges. The line drawn is perpendicular to the edge. The apothem of a regular pentagon is . What is the perimeter of this pentagon?

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Answer

From the given information, we can imagine the following image

Find_the_perimeter_pentagon

In order to solve for the perimeter, we need to solve for the length of one of the sides. This can be accomplished by creating a right triangle from the apothem and the top angle that's marked.

This angle measure can be calculated through:

, where the sum of all the angles around the center of the pentagon sum up to and the is for the number of sides. We can do this because all of the interior angles of the pentagon will be equal because it is regular. Then, this answer needs to be divided by because the pictured right triangle is half of a larger isosceles triangle.

Therefore, the marked angle is .

Now that one side and one angle are known, we can use SOH CAH TOA because this is a right triangle. In this case, the tangent function will be used because the mystery side of interest is opposite of the known angle, and we are already given the adjacent side (the apothem). In solving for the unknown side, we will label it as .

For a more precise answer, keep the entire number in your calculator. This will prevent rounding errors.

Keep in mind that the base of the triangle is actually only half the length of the side. This means that the value for must be multiplied by .

In order to solve for the perimeter, the length of the side needs to be multiplied by the number of sides; in this case, there are five sides.

This is the final answer, so the entire decimal is no longer needed. Rounded, the perimeter is .

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