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Geometry Difficulty 4.5 AIME Prove it Ireland

Assume ABCDABCD is a convex quadrilateral such that the triangles ABDABD, BCDBCD, CDACDA, and ABCABC have the same area. Prove that ABCDABCD is a parallelogram.

Solution

Let B′B' and D′D' on ACAC be the feet of the altitudes of the triangles △ABC\triangle ABC and △ADC\triangle ADC. Because these two triangles have the same area, we get ∣BB′∣=∣DD′∣|BB'| = |DD'|. This implies that the two right triangles BMB′BMB' and DMD′DMD', which have equal angles at MM, are congruent. In particular, ∣BM∣=∣MD∣|BM| = |MD|.

A similar argument, using the other diagonal, shows that ∣AM∣=∣MC∣|AM| = |MC|. Because the two triangles DMADMA and BMCBMC have equal angles at MM, they are now seen to be congruent. This shows that ∠MBC=∠MDA\angle MBC = \angle MDA, hence BCBC is parallel to DADA. In a similar way it follows that ABAB is parallel to CDCD, hence ABCDABCD is a parallelogram.

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Source: MathNet, licensed CC-BY-4.0. Statement reproduced verbatim; metadata (topic, difficulty) added by this project.