Robin Hood saves the day!

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One day, Robin Hood spots the Sheriff about to kill Maid Marian with an arrow! He knows that the Sheriff isn't the best shot, but he quickly sees that the distance between himself and the Sheriff is 65 meters and he is one the Sheriff's exact left. Exactly straight ahead of the Sheriff, 73 meters away, is the Maid. Both the Sheriff of Nottingham and Robin Hood's bows shoot arrows at 20 meters per second. He wants to intercept the Sheriff's arrow with his own when it is a meter away from Marian. Let x x be the number of seconds that he must shoot before the Sheriff if he wants to achieve this. Let y y be the angle that he must turn his arrow so that he will hit his mark (relative to the invisible line between the Sheriff and himself). What is the value of x + y + 1 x+y+1 rounded to the nearest whole number? Assume that the arrows are unaffected by gravity.


The answer is 50.

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2 solutions

Pranshu Bhatnagar
Jan 29, 2014

It's pretty simple actually Assume that Robin hood is at point R, Mariam at Ma and Sheriff at S. Triangle is to be made at M which is 1 metre before Mariam in the line joining Mariam at Sheriff RS=65, MS =72, By pythagoras theorem, RM =97 Time reqd by R is 4.85s ; S is 3.6s and gap is of 1.25 s => x= 1.25 and y = arctan(72/65) = 47.92 degrees x+y+1= 1.25 + 47.92 + 1 = 50.17 which is almost 50. QED.

Finn Hulse
Jan 29, 2014

First we set up a right triangle. The two legs have length 65 65 and 72 72 Using the Pythagorean Theorem, we find that the hypotenuse (the distance that he shoots the arrow) is 97 97 meters. So the time it takes is 97 / 20 97/20 Subtracting this value from 72 / 20 72/20 gets 1.25 -1.25 as x. But it's actually positive because we're asked for how long before Sheriff should he shoot. So x is 1.25 1.25 Using a bit of trig, we find that the angle that he turns is 47.92 47.92 degrees. For anyone who was confused about my wording, that 47.92 47.92 degrees was how much he had to turn to get from Sheriff to Mariam. Adding the two together gets 49.17 49.17 Adding one to this gets 50 50

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