The base of an isosceles triangle is 16 cm and its area is 48 cm2 . What is the length of the equal sides of the triangle?  8 cm10 cm16 cm32 cm

To find the length of the equal sides of the isosceles triangle, we first need to find the height of the triangle.

The formula for the area of a triangle is 1/2 * base * height. We know the base (16 cm) and the area (48 cm^2), so we can set up the following equation to solve for the height:

48 = 1/2 * 16 * height 48 = 8 * height height = 48 / 8 height = 6 cm

Now that we have the height, we can use the Pythagorean theorem to find the length of the equal sides. The Pythagorean theorem is a^2 + b^2 = c^2, where a and b are the lengths of the two shorter sides (in this case, the base and the height) and c is the length of the hypotenuse (the equal sides of the isosceles triangle).

We know the base (16 cm) and the height (6 cm), so we can set up the following equation to solve for the length of the equal sides:

(16/2)^2 + 6^2 = c^2 8^2 + 6^2 = c^2 64 + 36 = c^2 100 = c^2 c = sqrt(100) c = 10 cm

So, the length of the equal sides of the triangle is 10 cm.