How to find the perimeter of a hexagon - Math

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Question

A regular hexagon has a radius of . Find the perimeter.

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Answer

Perimeter_of_a_hexagon

The only information given in the problem is the radius. From the radius, we are expected to solve for the perimeter. But in order to do so, we have to go through a few small steps. The initial goal is to solve for the length of one of the sides. Once one of the sides has been found, the perimeter can be solved for by multiplying the side length by the number of sides ().

In order to solve for the side (or as some call it, the base side), we can use right triangles.

Perimeter_of_a_hexgon_resolution

The first step is to solve for the internal angles of the hexagon. This can be solved through , where is the number of sides.

= internal angle measurement

This angle gets bisected in the right triangle we can draw using the radius. This means that the bottom right corner of the figure is . Now that we have one side and one angle measure, we can solve for the base of the triangle in one of two ways.
1. Using trigonometric functions (SOH CAH TOA)
2. Remembering the rules of a 30/60/90 triangle

Using the rules of the 30/60/90 triangle, where the hypotenuse equals the value and the side opposite of (in this case, our base) is . Because , this means that our base is ; however, because the base of the triangle only makes up half of the length of a side, this means that the side length is actually .

Now that we have the value of the side length, we can solve for the perimeter using the formula mentioned previously:

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