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

Answer:

64.20m

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