Question

A chimpanzee sitting against his favorite tree gets up and walks 51 m due east and 39 m due south to reach a termite mound, where he eats lunch. (a) What is the shortest distance between the tree and the termite mound

Answer 1

64.20m

Step-by-step explanation:

As we can see from the image I have attached below, the route that the chipanzee makes forms a right triangle. In this case, the shortest distance is represented by x in the image, which is the hypotenuse. To find this value we use the Pythagorean theorem which is the following.

`a^(2) +b^(2) = c^(2)`

where a and b are the length of the two sides and c is the length of the hypotenuse (x). Therefore, we can plug in the values of the image and solve for x

`51^(2) +39^(2) =x^(2)`

2,601 + 1,521 =
`x^(2)`

4,122 =
`x^(2)` ... square root both sides

64.20 = x

Finally, we see that the shortest distance is 64.20m