Do you mean 3^4?
If you mean this^ the answer would be 81.
The houses form a right triangle. Using a²+b²=c² you will find that the distance from Clayton’s house to Danny’s would be 4.1 miles. Adding it all up, the distance would be 9.1 miles of walking.
One nice thing about this situation is that you’ve been given everything in the same base. To review a little on the laws of exponents, when you have two exponents with the same base being:
– Multiplied: Add their exponents
– Divided: Subtract their exponents
We can see that in both the numerator and denominator we have exponents *multiplied* together, and the product in the numerator is being *divided* by the product in the detonator, so that translates to *summing the exponents on the top and bottom and then finding their difference*. Let’s throw away the twos for a moment and just focus on the exponents. We have
[11/2 + (-7) + (-5)] - [3 + 1/2 + (-10)]
For convenience’s sake, I’m going to turn 11/2 into the mixed number 5 1/2. Summing the terms in the first brackets gives us
5 1/2 + (-7) + (-5) = - 1 1/2 + (-5) = -6 1/2
And summing the terms in the second:
3 + 1/2 + (-10) = 3 1/2 + (-10) = -6 1/2
Putting those both into our first question gives us -6 1/2 - (-6 1/2), which is 0, since any number minus itself gives us 0.
Now we can bring the 2 back into the mix. The 0 we found is the exponent the 2 is being raised to, so our answer is
2^0, which is just 1.
