Allen wants to build a fence in his backyard for his herb garden out of the 14 feet of fencing he owns wants to fence off as small an area as possible to leave room for his other plants. Using all of the fencing, what is the smallest possible area he can fence off in square feet?
This section requires Javascript.
You are seeing this because something didn't load right. We suggest you, (a) try
refreshing the page, (b) enabling javascript if it is disabled on your browser and,
finally, (c)
loading the
non-javascript version of this page
. We're sorry about the hassle.
First of all, you have to mention that all side lengths are positive integers. But after that, you see that any two adjacent side lengths must add up to 7 (to have a total perimeter of 14). To minimize the area, we see that 1 and 6 work, and their product is 6.