This week let us take a brea Trapezium and its properties. from PnC and do some Geometry. Specifically, we'll focus on the A trapezium is a quadrilateral where exactly one pair of sides is parallel (note that if the second pair were to become parallel too, it would be a parallelogram). The most common way of depicting a trapezium is as in figure (a) below, but note that the other figures are also trapezia (the parallel sides being marked with a), and we should not get locked into visualising a trapezium in only that one way. (a) (b) (©) qd) We can construct a line joining the midpoints of the two non-parallel sides of a trapezium. For convenience, we shall refer to this as the median of the uapezium, The height of a vapezium is usually defined as the perpendicular distance between the two parallel sides. A special case of a trapezium is the isosceles trapezium, wherein the two non-parallel sides are congruent (Fig (a) above is an example of an isosceles trapezium). In this case, the base angles (i.e. the two angles bordering any one of the parallel sides) are equal. Properties of a trapezium: Inany trapezium, two pairs of adjacent angles are supplementary This is a straightforward result of the fact that two sides ate parallel. In the adjacent figure AB || CD and hence Zw + £2 = Zx + Zy = 180° (since each is a pair of interior angles) Consider the adjacent figure, where MN is the median of ABCD. Let’s draw PC || AD. Thus APCD will be a parallelogram and hence I(AP) = I(MO) =I(DC) = x (say). Also in APBC, by midpoint theorem if (ON) =y then (PB) = 2y. Then (MN) = x + y while (AB) + (DC) = 2x +2y, Le. (MN) = ¥% [I(AB) + (DC)] The area of a trapezium is given by (median) x (height) Consider the adjacent figure, Drop perpendiculars PQ and SR through M *\—s and N. It is easy to show that AAPM = ADQM and ABSN = ACRN. iN f This in turn implies that the area of wapezium ABCD = the area of rectangle PQRS which is nothing but (MN) x (PQ) or median x height.