Question

The distance between two points on a coordinate plane can always be found by subtracting their x- or y-coordinates. True or false.

Answer 1

This one's a tricky one.  Subtracting the respective coordinates is the first step.  But that in itself doesn't give the distance; there's some squaring and adding and square rooting to do.  I'm going to go with

Answer: false

Rather than worry about this confusing question, let's review the distance formula.  I find it easier to think of as the Pythagorean theorem.   The distance r between points (a,b) and (c,d) satisfies

$r^2 = (a-c)^2 + (b - d)^2$

When I'm doing math I usually try to avoid taking a square root.  But if we're asked directly for the distance, it's often unavoidable:

$r = \sqrt{(a-c)^2 +(b-d)^2}$