Two hundred feet of woven wire fencing is available to build a rectangular pen. If a stone wall already constructed is used as one side of the pen, express the area A of the pen as a function of the side x, measured in feet, that is parallel to the wall.

43605
49244
43571
40504
43402
27609
62901
63130
35404
35475

 .

SHE'S A STATE away from home, on the other side of the Ohio, in bluegrass country, land of the rolling pasture, land of the magnificent fence. She's crossed a stile for the first time and, because everything is so spread out, has spent hours riding shotgun in somebody's – usually her uncle's – truck. Today they're going to the Paris stockyards: she's expecting her first whiff of The Jungle.

Fences trace the contours of hillsides, shoulder their way along the beds of creeks, white fences, black fences: her chain-linked imagination ruminates on history, worries over succession and loyalty. She thinks white was the color of the First Fence, but she doesn't know what prompts that thought, probably the scene in Tom Sawyer, probably at any rate, some book. The fences have to be wooden to spare the horse's flesh, that much her uncle, a local, has told her; of that lore she's confident. White is pristine and traditional, prone to fade and decay. Black has to be a decision, she decides, maybe a practical one, maybe just difference for the sake of difference, maybe for its sex appeal. The black fences are certainly sexy in their low contrast with the grass, in their echo of the horses's coloring, in their absorptive power.

Along the road, the wide, tree-canopied road, the fences are stone. All along the long long road, on each side, as far as she can see, parallel lines. Her uncle tells her there's no mortar involved, each stone has been carefully chosen and placed. The fences seem inevitable, as if they had simply grown up there, broken through. She loves these fences unreasonably. Slaves built them, her uncle tells her, a long time ago.




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