An artist wants to reduce the size of a drawing using a scale factor of 3: 13: 1 . the original drawing has an area of 720 square inches. what is area of the new drawing? enter your answer in the box.

When shrinking an image, the size of each side is shrunk by the scale factor.  However the area is not shrunk by the same factor.  Area is a squared measurement (when finding the area of a rectangle we take length x width; two measurements, so a squared answer), so the area will be shrunk by the scale factor squared; in this case the area is shrunk by 3² or 9.  This means the new area would be 720/9 or 80 square inches.

quantitative manipulation of the independent variable