A bit late to the game but I recently gave a variant of this question to my top year 9 class. Understandably they struggled and requested an explanation, so posting here in case it helps any future students:
These rectangles and curves questions pop up quite a bit in relation to inequality proofs, so it's good to get comfortable with the technique. Here's a few similar questions I've seen on this front:
Funnily enough I got exactly 94 for my extension 2 HSC mark. From memory I had a crack at everything, but there was one question where I was just stabbing in the dark. This was back when Extension 2 HSC exams only had 8 questions, so I’d say I felt good about 7/8 of the questions to end up with 94 …