Most SAT students pick 30 as their answer..

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:00]cooked if you think this answer is 30.

[00:00:01]The area of a triangle is 240 cm. The length of the base of the triangle is 14 cm greater than the height of the triangle. What's the height? All right.

[00:00:11]All right. You know the drill. We always got to start these with chicken scratch.

[00:00:14]Let's turn words into quick visuals. We have a triangle. Area is 240. The base is 14 greater than the height. So 14 + h. We can put h in for the height, too.

[00:00:26]Now we're given areas, heights, and sides. That tells me we're going to back solve this by using the area. And remember, the area of a triangle is 1/2 * base * height or area 240 = 1/2 * base 14 + h * height h. So 240 = 1/2 * 14 + h * h. Let's clean up. To get rid of the 1/2, we can multiply the left side by 2.

[00:00:49]480 = 14h + h ^2 or 0 = h ^2 + 14h - 480. Now to factor this, we need to find the two numbers that multiply to -480 and add to 14. That's kind of hard. So let's just take that equation into Desmos. 0 = x^2 + 14x - 480. We see x or our h is -30 and 16. Height can't be negative, so we know it's 16. Oh, and if you have our original equation set up, you can just plug in answer choices.

[00:01:20]Want more SAT hacks? Click the video below.