At Westonci.ca, we make it easy to get the answers you need from a community of informed and experienced contributors. Discover in-depth solutions to your questions from a wide range of experts on our user-friendly Q&A platform. Get immediate and reliable solutions to your questions from a community of experienced professionals on our platform.

Why do you think a dilation with 0 < k < 1 results in a reduction?

Sagot :

Multiplying x by any positive number smaller than 1 will result in some smaller value.

For example, if the scale factor is k = 0.5, then we can think of this as the fraction k = 1/2. Multiplying by 1/2 will make any number smaller, namely, exactly half as much.

  • 1/2 times 100 = 50
  • 1/2 times 78 = 39
  • 1/2 times 600 = 300

We are taking a fractional part of the original number, so its expected the result is smaller. It's like having a whole cake and we only take slices of that cake to end up with the new value. There's no way having one or more slice be larger than the original whole amount.

Because things are getting smaller, we call this type of dilation to be a reduction or we can call it shrinking. This is in contrast to an enlargement when k > 1.

-----------------------------------------

More info (optional section)

Claim:  For some positive number k such that k < 1, we have xk < x when x is positive.

The proof of this claim is fairly straight forward.

We multiply both sides of k < 1 by x to get

k < 1

x*k < x*1

xk < x

The inequality sign does not flip because we're multiplying both sides by a positive number x.

So because xk < x, this shows that the original value x gets smaller to xk when we apply the positive scale factor k such that k < 1. This is the same as saying 0 < k < 1. Furthermore, xk < x is the same as 0 < xk < x.