Question

Alice the alien is visiting planet earth to acquire cow specimen for her terrestrial research. She has landed her ship in a pasture. The ships sensors are giving up the coordinates of the surrounding cows in meters.

Cow A is at point (6,8)
Cow B is at point (-4,9)
Cow C is at point (7,7)
If Alice wants to acquire the cow that is closest to her ship, which cow should she take?
Cow A
Cow B
Cow C
Also determine the distance from the cow to Alice's ship is ___m. Round the final answer to the nearest tenth of a meter.

Answer 1

Cow B is the closest, It is 9.85 m away from the ship.

Explanation:

It helps to draw this on a graph, so you can see the attached picture for that.

Next, you need to imagine a straight line from the origin (the ship) to each cow. When you do this, you can see that they become right triangles with the y-coordinate as the height and the x-coordinate as the base. To find the length of a hypotenuse (in this case the distance from ship to cow), you need to use
`√(b^2+h^2)`.

When you do this equation for each cow, you see that Cow B has the lowest answer being 9.84886. But you need to remember that the question asks for the nearest tenth, so you round that answer to 9.8 meters.