CPM Homework Help : CALC3RD Problem 5-69

YELLOW SUBMARINE, Part Two

Ring O’s detention chamber for blue meanies worked fine at first, but a problem has developed—he is too successful at catching them! Their meanness creates lots of fights, noise, and general unpleasantness, so he needs to modify his detention chamber. In his second design, he split the chamber into three parts, with barbed wire partitions of course! The entire chamber will still have $40$ square meters of area. What dimensions of the chamber minimize the amount of barbed wire?

Horizontal Rectangle, top edge labeled, submarine wall, divided into 3 equal vertical sections, interior labeled, total area = 40 square meters.

Hint 1:

First get an equation for the length of the barbed wire in terms of one variable.

Hint 2:

Let the Length of the detention chamber be $x$ and the width be $y$ .
$40 = xy$
$L = 4y + x$

Hint 3:

Refer to problem 5-39 for more guidance.