Trapezoids and Kites: Introduction

Have you ever flown a kite?  Chances are you have at least seen a kite in the air.  Perhaps you have seen various fancy kites with fun designs or different shapes, but you are familiar with the very basic kite shape.  Kites are able to withstand the force of the wind because of the supports that attach across the kite from vertex to vertex.  These supports are perpendicular to each other and divide the kite into four triangles.  In this section, we are going to study this shape as well as another special quadrilateral, the trapezoid.