Over the weekend, trigg and craig drove to lake of the pines to go fishing. now they're preparing to go home. trigg needs gas for his jeep, which gets 27 miles per gallon for gas mileage. when he stops at the gas station, he already has 5 gallons of gas in his tank. he buys more gas for $1.25 per gallon. if trigg spends $23.50 on gas, what is the total distance the boys could travel? round, if necessary to the nearest tenth

something that characterises a right triangle is the fact that we may use pythagoras' theorem to find any one of its sides given that we have the length of the other two sides. here, we have the length of the hypotenuse, √(87) yd, and one other side, √(23) yd, thus we can easily find the length of the remaining side using pythagoras' theorem as defined below:

c^2 = a^2 + b^2, where c is the length of the hypotenuse, and a and b are the lengths of the other two sides.

thus, given that c = √(87) and a = √(23), we may substitute these into the formula we defined above to get:

c^2 = a^2 + b^2

(√87)^2 = (√23)^2 + b^2 (substitute c = √87 and a = √23 into the equation)

87 = 23 + b^2 (evaluate (√87)^2 = 87 and (√23)^2 = 23 - remember that the square root of a number, squared will equal that very same number)

64 = b^2 (subtract 23 from both sides)

√64 = b (take the square root of both sides)

8 = b (evaluate √64 = 8)

therefor, the length of the unknown leg in the right triangle is 8 yd (first answer).