The area of a square is 144 sq cm. Find the length of its diagonal

The area of a square is given as 144 sq cm. To find the length of its diagonal, we need to use the Pythagorean theorem, which states that in a right-angled triangle, the square of the length of the hypotenuse (the longest side) is equal to the sum of the squares of the lengths of the other two sides. In the case of a square, we know that all sides are equal in length, so we can use this fact to simplify the equation. Let's call the length of one side of the square "s". Then, we know that the area of the square is s^2 = 144 sq cm. Solving for "s", we get s = sqrt(144) = 12 cm. Now, let's draw a diagonal line across the square, splitting it into two right-angled triangles. We can label the hypotenuse of each triangle as "d" (which is the length of the diagonal we want to find), and the other two sides as "s". Using the Pythagorean theorem, we get: d^2 = s^2 + s^2 d^2 = 2s^2 d^2 = 2(12^2) d^2 = 288 d = sqrt(288) = 12sqrt(2) So the length of the diagonal is 12sqrt(2) cm.