pythagorean therom word probelm

Question

Three people are sitting on a bus. Janelle is directly behind Martina and directly left of Victor. If Martina and Janelle are 4 meters apart, and Victor and Martina are 5 meters apart, what is the distance between Janelle and Victor?

Answer 1

Hi Sofia,

Your Question: Three people are sitting on a bus. Janelle is directly behind Martina and directly left of Victor. If Martina and Janelle are 4 meters apart, and Victor and Martina are 5 meters apart, what is the distance between Janelle and Victor?

This would be your diagram

(Janelle directly behind Martina, and Directly left of Victor)

Martina

Janelle Victor

It creates a right triangle.

One Leg of the triangle (Martina to Janelle) is 4 meters

The hypotenuse (Martina to Victor) is 5 meters.

You are looking for the 2nd leg of the triangle.

This is a special triangle. It's a 3 4 5 So the distance between Janelle and Victor is 3 meters.

If it wasn't a special triangle, you could find out the distance using the Pythagorean theorem.

a²+b²=c² a and b are the legs, c is the hypotenuse.

So

4²+b²= 5²

b²= 25-16

b²= 9

b = 3

Hope this helps.