Answer:
12 cm
Step-by-step explanation:
I drew a picture of a rectangle with a diagonal measurement of 13 units and what appear to be the shortest side to be 5 units. (This picture was not drawn to scale.) We were has to find the longest side which I said was b. Notice the diagonal cuts the rectangle into right triangles.
We will need to use Pythagorean Theorem to find the length of the longer side of the rectangle.
[tex]5^2+b^2=13^2[/tex]
[tex]25+b^2=169[/tex]
Subtract 25 on both sides:
[tex]b^2=144[/tex]
Take square root of both sides:
[tex]b=\sqrt{144}[/tex] (I did not worry about the negative answer to this because we are dealing with lengths.)
[tex]b=12[/tex]
