Question

Two students are using the distance formula to determine the distance between (9, 4) and (–3, 8) on a coordinate grid. Their work is shown below.

Answer 1

Your answer would be A.) because squared answers always turn out positive

Hope this helps!

Answer 2

The differences are 12 for one student and -12 for the other student, and -4 for one student and 4 for the other student. The differences are clearly different as they are additive inverses of each other, but since the differences are squared, the numbers become the same after squaring.