In figure 5, rectangle ABCD is inscribed in a circle. If the radius of the circle is 1 and AB = 1, what is the area of the shaded region?
A) 0.091
B) 0.285
C) 0.614
D) 0.705
E) 0.732
Yesterday I went to a museum and waited in line for a very long time for my turn to spend 5 minutes staring at a piece of art that completely mystified me. I guess it’s good art if I’m still thinking about it a day later, even if the thoughts I’m having mostly revolve around (more…)
I’m heading out this morning to go camping for the weekend (Woohoo! Bug bites!) and I won’t have any way to access the Internet reliably, so if you enter this contest please be patient. I probably won’t be able to declare a winner or post a solution until Monday evening. I’m told the place we’ll (more…)
I didn’t do a Weekend Challenge last weekend. It’s not like I didn’t want to, y’all. Things just got totally cray-cray. My use of “cray-cray” in the previous sentence should be enough of an indication to you that things remain squarely thus. I actually wrote two questions for this weekend, but I’m only going to (more…)
So the question writing contest I proposed a few weeks back didn’t exactly explode onto the scene like I thought it would, but I still think it’s a fantastic way for you to improve your skills, so just FYI: it’s still open. I got the question above in an email the other day. The writer (more…)
Here’s an important thing to remember: all figures on the SAT are drawn to scale unless indicated otherwise. In other words, if it doesn’t say “Note: figure not drawn to scale,” underneath it, it is drawn to scale. Most figures on the SAT are drawn to scale, which means it’s a good idea to guesstimate whenever (more…)
If you’ve ever sat down and taken a practice (or real) SAT, you’ve come across shaded region questions. They’re among the most iconic question types on the test, so much so that you may find that the memory of them remains with you long after your SAT taking days have passed. True story: I had (more…)
Before we get into triangles, we need to take a very quick look at the ingredients of a triangle: line segments and angles. Please tell me you already know this stuff: We good? Cool. Prove it: In the figure above, AE, BS, CG, DS, and FS intersect at point S. Which of the following (more…)
In the figure above, AB is the diameter of the circle, and AC = BC. What is the area of the shaded region? (A) 4π – 2 (B) 2π – 1 (C) π (D) π – 1 (E) π – 2 Answer and explanation after the jump… As is usually the case with shaded region problems, the easiest way (and in this (more…)