Interactive · 1 question
One way to prove that a quadrilateral is an isosceles trapezoid is to show:
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The quadrilateral has two parallel sides.
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The lower base angles are congruent and the upper base angles are congruent.
Let's look at an example to illustrate how one might go about proving that a quadrilateral is an isosceles trapezoid.

First, let's show that is parallel to The line segment that contains is a transversal that intersects with and Notice that AND its corresponding angle are both equal to Thus, For more information on why this is true, here is an explanation on the relationship between transversals, parallel lines, and angles.
Since we know that ABCD is a trapezoid. Next, we have to show that the corresponding base angles are congruent.
What is the measure of
If we look at the trapezoid, we can see that is the supplementary angle to To calculate we subtract from to get So: The lower base angles are congruent!
We can also check that the upper base angles are congruent. Because we can conclude that We also know that is supplementary to so: So: The upper base angles are congruent!
We have shown that this quadrilateral has two parallel sides and congruent corresponding base angles. Thus, ABCD is an isosceles trapezoid.
