ShmoopTube

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Here’s your shmoop du jour, brought to you by enlarging squares.

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We told them not to buy that house downstream from the chemical plant.

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If the sides of a square increase in size by 25%, what happens to the area of the square?

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Here are the answer options...

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To solve this problem we should set

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up an equation where x equals the original length of each side of the square.

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So clearly the area of the original square would have been x squared…

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Okay…now we’re increasing the length of each side by 25%.

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Let’s think about this – if something is 25% larger, then it is 125% of its original size…

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or 1.25 times its original size...

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…and a side that used to have a length of 1 is now 1.25x in length. Got it?

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Now we’ve got our new length… we square that baby –

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1.25x squared – to get 1.5625x squared.

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Which is, right here, 56.25% larger than it was before.

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Okay, so answer D.

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As in “Dental surgery”…

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