A boy starts from his school and travels 3 km towards east and then 4 km towards north.
Find the displacement of the boy from initial to final position.
Answers
Answer:
What you have described is a right angled triangle as from a centre point north to east makes a right angle. The distances you quote are very well known to architects and builders as they always give a hypotenuse (long side of a triangle) as 5 units. If you want to make a square side triangle use those measurements. Not sure what you mean by displacement but if you mean the distance from where you started it is the hypotenuse length. There is a formula for working that out. It is the Pythagorean theorem. Work out the square of both known sides and add them together that will give you square of the long side. In your example it is 3 squared plus 4 squared = 9 plus 16 = 25. Now find the square root of that for the distance from your start point. On my calculator the square root of 25 is 5. In real life it will be more to travel as we live on a sphere but it won’t be much. It is always 5 mathematically in two dimesions.