Question

Rebecca is taking a walk in a nearby park. She walks 39.0 meters West, turns and walks 46.0 meters South, then stops to rest. Calculate Rebecca's total displacement from her starting position. Round your answer to the nearest tenth.

Answer 1

60.31 meters :)

Explanation:

Displacement is simply how far you are from where you started - path does not matter! If you walk around the earth to your original position it will still be zero. So, with that in mind, let's draw out her path.

<-------39m------------ Start

|

|

46m

|

|

v

Finish

Looking at that terrible diagram, you can see the diagnoal is her net displacment from the start. So we can jsut think about this as a right triangle. Hopefully you know a^2 + b^2 = c^2 which we will use to find the hypotenuse (c).

Therefore, plugging in the values,

39^2 + 46^2 = c^2

sqrt(39^2 + 46^2) = c

60.31 = c

and c = net displacement

Hope that helps ^^