# Eye-Balling

Surprisingly, on the SAT you can often solve geometry problems by merely “eye-balling” the given drawing. Even on problems whose answers you can’t get directly by looking, you often can eliminate a couple of the answer-choices.
• Unless stated otherwise, all figures are drawn exactly to scale. Hence, if an angle looks like it’s about 90°, it is; if one figure looks like it’s about twice as large as another figure, it is.
All the problems in this section were solved before. Now, we will solve them by eye-balling the drawings.

Example-1

In the figure, if , then what is the value of y?

1. 20
2. 45
3. 55
4. 75
5. 110
Solution

By eye-balling the drawing, we can see that y is less than 90˚.

It appears to be somewhere between 65˚ and 85˚.

But 75˚ is the only answer-choice in that range.

Example-2

In the figure, the area of the shaded region is

1. 1/2
2. 2/3
3. 7/8
4. 3/2
5. 5/2
Solution

The area of the larger triangle is .

Now, by eye-balling the drawing, the area of the shaded region looks to be about half that of the larger triangle.