A Guide to the GRE/Squares

Squares

The area of a square equals its side squared.

Area = s²

The diagonal of a square equals its side multiplied by ${\sqrt {2}}$

This comes from the Pythagorean theorem. The diagonal is the greatest distance between any two points on the square.

Practice

1. The diagonal of a square is equal to 5. What is the length of a side of the square?

2. Square A has 3 times the size of Square B. If Square B's side has a length of 10, what is the length of a side of Square A?

Answers to Practice Questions

1.

The diagonal of a square is equal tomultiplied by its side; thus, the side of a square is equal to its diagonal divided by, or multiplied by In the case of this particular square, this means that the diagonal is equal to

2.

The area of a square is its side squared. Thus if a2 = 3b2 then a must equalSince the length of one side of the latter square is 10, the first square's side must equal