When a right triangle is rotated about one leg, the volume of the cone produced is 800π cm3. When the triangle is rotated about the other leg, the volume of the cone produced is 1920π cm3. What is the length (in cm) of the hypotenuse of the triangle?
解析
Solution
Let one leg of the triangle have length a and let the other leg have length b. When we rotate around the leg of length a, the result is a cone of height a and radius b, and so of volume 31πab2=800π. Likewise, when we rotate around the leg of length b we get a cone of height b and radius a and so of volume 31πba2=1920π. If we divide this equation by the previous one, we get ba=31πab231πba2=8001920=512, so a=512b. Then 31π(512b)b2=800π so b3=1000 and b=10 so a=24. Then by the Pythagorean Theorem, the hypotenuse has length a2+b2=026.
Let a and b be the two legs of the equation. We can find ba by doing 800π1920π. This simplified is 512. We can represent the two legs as 12x and 5x for a and b respectively.
Since the volume of the first cone is 800π, we use the formula for the volume of a cone and get 100πx3=800π. Solving for x, we get x=2.
Plugging in the side lengths to the Pythagorean Theorem, we get an answer of 026.