Question

help please
A person walks along a road 2 miles and rests. Then taking another road, he travels 3 miles; and switching to a dirt path, he walks 2 miles before arriving at his destination. Calculate distance or displacement and state which you calculated.

Answer 1

Distance is the sum of these.
To find displacement, we would need to know the directions as well.

Answer 2

but thats all they gave me to work with

Answer 3

"state which you calculated"

That's the trick. The question implies you can only calculate one of those two things.

Answer 4

oh, so um, what am i suppose to do?

Answer 5

Well if you only know how far the person walked, but not the direction, which one of either displacement or distance can you calculate? (douglaswinslowcooper has already given you the answer to this)

Answer 6

no?

Answer 7

"To find displacement, we would need to know the directions as well."

We don't know direction, so we can only work out distance.

How far has the person in the question walked?

Answer 8

but there has to be some way, this is a major problem on my assignment and idk if they'd make a mistake like that but, okay, umm the person has walked........2 miles and then rest

Answer 9

There's no mistake here. The questions says to calculate displacement OR distance (not both). You can only calculate distance because you don't know direction.

2 miles is the first bit. How far did the person walk in total?

Answer 10

They want you to conclude that you can find the distance from this information but not the net displacement.

Answer 11

oooooh, okay, i get it now, thanks for explaining, and um... 7 miles i believe

Answer 12

7 miles distance
unknown displacement right

Answer 13

yes

Answer 14

oh, so 7 miles is the answer??

Answer 15

Yep

Answer 16

oh, well that was easy, usually this takes me like two days to solve each problem, lol, thanks :)

Answer 17

do you think you can help me with one more?