2005 AIME I Problems/Problem 10
Problem
Triangle lies in the Cartesian Plane and has an area of 70. The coordinates of and are and respectively, and the coordinates of are The line containing the median to side has slope Find the largest possible value of
Solution
The midpoint of line segment is . Let be the point , which lies along the line through of slope . The area of triangle can be computed in a number of ways (one possibility: extend until it hits the line , and subtract one triangle from another), and each such calculation gives an area of 14. This is of our needed area, so we simply need the point to be 5 times as far from as is. Thus , and the sum of coordinates will be larger if we take the positive value, so and the answer is .