Question: To get from home to her friend Elaina's house, Cheyenne drives 7 miles to the north. To get from home to her friend Michael's house, Cheyenne drive 24 miles west. The straight-line distance between Elaina's house and Michael's house is ___ miles.
Solution:
Consider the following diagram:
where h is the distance between Elaina's house and Michael's house. Now, applying the Pythagorean theorem to the previous image (right triangle) we have the following equation:
[tex]h\text{ = }\sqrt[]{7^2+24^2\text{ }}=\text{ 25}[/tex]so that, we can conclude that the straight-line distance between Elaina's house and Michael's house is 25 miles.
