When you buy a bigger TV, how much more do you really get?

Televisions (indeed, all screens) are measured diagonally. When Best Buy lists a TV as having a 42-inch screen, it means 42 inches on the diagonal. Yet even though this is advertised as the screen’s size, the diagonal only tells us part of the story about how much screen there is.

In this lesson, students use the Pythagorean Theorem along with some proportional reasoning to investigate the relationship between the diagonal length, aspect ratio, and screen area of a TV.

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