Vectors and Projectiles Legacy Problem #4 Guided Solution

This problem represents a good example of the need to diagram a situation. We have a picture of Claire who's walking down the aisle. It doesn't say whether she's walking north or south or east or west. She's just walking some direction. So I would just draw an arrow on a sheet of paper and label it 16 meters. She's walking 16 meters. Now put yourself along that arrow as though you were walking. You could use your fingers to try to picture it. And then make a right-hand turn. So if you were going, drew an arrow down on the sheet of paper and it was representing 16 meters down, and then you were to turn right, you'd be heading off to actually left on the page of paper, or west on a map. And so now you go 21 meters in that direction, and you're done. And what you're asked to find is the resulting displacement. What's the displacement, start to finish? And it says magnitude, disregard direction here. So the resultant goes from the tail of your starting point to the final point. And you can draw that arrow right there on your diagram, and look at what you've drawn. You've drawn a right triangle. You've drawn a triangle that has as one of its sides 16 meters and the other side 21 meters, and you need to find the hypotenuse of that triangle. This means we need to use the Pythagorean theorem. 16 squared plus 21 squared equals resultant squared. Plug in there, take the square root of the right side, and you have your answer.