sritamasia
Sam is drawing a polygon. After completing the figure, he observed that the number of diagonals for that polygon is the same as the number of its sides. Which figure did she draw?
A. Triangle
B. Quadrilateral
C. Pentagon
D. Hexagon
E. None of these
I'm curious of the source, since the wording is strange. Is Sam "drawing a polygon", or has Sam drawn the polygon already? It's not clear why the question doesn't simply say "After drawing a polygon, Sam observed..."
If you draw n points on a page, you can connect pairs of points to create line segments in nC2 ways. So if we draw the n vertices of a polygon, and we draw every conceivable line connecting pairs of points, we'll draw nC2 lines. All of those lines are diagonals except the n lines that are the edges of the polygon, which is why a polygon has nC2 - n diagonals. So we can use that to answer the question (we just solve the equation nC2 - n = n, so nC2 = 2n, and (n)(n-1)/2 = 2n, so n-1 = 4 and n = 5). But here I think it's probably easier just to do the problem by inspection -- a rectangle has only 2 diagonals, so we need a shape bigger than a quadrilateral, and just drawing a pentagon and counting its diagonals gets you the answer easily enough.