Categories
Intermediate

The hunting horn

Two semicircles and four tangents. What’s the area of the orange rectangle?

Scroll down for a solution to this problem.

Solution

The rectangle area is 8.

Calling the small radius r and the large one R, I have added a few dimensions to the diagram. Reflecting the semicircles in the diameter, we obtain circles and we can apply the Intersecting chords theorem. This gives 2r*2(R-r)=4*4. So 2r(R-r)=8. But this is exactly the area we need.

Visual solution

David Andriana kindly provided a visual solution to The hunting horn:

🤞 Don’t miss these puzzles!

Subscribe to the weekly geometry puzzle e-mail.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Optionally add an image (JPEG only)