Q:  The area of a circle is 16(pi) cm squared.  What is the diameter of the circle?

Answer:

First we need to know the area formula for a circle… This is:

A = pi*r^2  [r is the radius]

Since the area is given to us, we can plug that in to the formula to get:

16*pi = pi*r^2

The only variable is r, so we can use algebra to solve for r like so:

Divide both sides by pi (which makes the pi’s cancel out):

16*pi /pi = pi*r^2 /pi

16 = r^2

Now, take the square root of both sides to solve for r:

sqrt(16) = r

4 = r

So, the radius of the circle is 4.  The diameter is 2*radius… So, the diameter is 8 cm.