ShmoopTube

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Here’s your shmoop du jour, brought to you by deadly spiders. Hope you don’t have algebraphobia.

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Which of the following could NOT be the value of x?

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Note that the figure is not drawn to scale.

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Here are the potential answers...

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Thank goodness this figure is not drawn to scale.

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For a second there, we were worried we were about to be attacked by this Daddy-long-legs from Hell…

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All right, so this question wants to know what x is definitely not.

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We’re not given any precise values… just a bunch of x’s and y’s…

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so we have to think about what else we know…

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Well… we know that if we add up all these angles, they have to come out to 360.

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Our figure isn’t a circle, exactly, but the angles go all the way around in a circle,

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so it’s basically the same deal.

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Now… what do we have?

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They give us 2x + x + x + y + 2x + x + x + y.

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Once we combine like terms, that gets us to 8x plus 2y.

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We have no idea what y is… all we know is that 8x can’t be more than 360 degrees total.

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So…our first instinct should be to check out E, 50, which is the biggest number of the bunch.

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8 times 50 is 400… which is indeed more than 360.

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If we wanted we could check the others… but even choice D, 40, would be fine.

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8 times 40 is 320, which is under that 360 degree mark.

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So our answer is clearly choice E.

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As in, “Exterminator.”

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