Microsoft Interview Question – Compute the Area of the Triangle

ACMer

10 years ago

The following seems an easy question, to get the area of the rectangluar triangle with the slope equals to 10 and the height equals to 6.

rectangluar triangle

If your answer is 30 (10×6/2), then you are falling into the trap: Such triangle doesn’t exist at all!

If we label the triangle with the following,

Triangle with Labels

What we can get are:

If we add these two equations:

After simplification, we have:

Thus,

because .

If, , , we can plot the graph,

plot-for-triangle-max

The maximum value for function y is 25, which means that the maximum value of c is

Such triangle does not exist (the height is 6, which exceeds the maximum length)!

Typical Microsoft. If something is wrong then it is by design and you are stuck with it.