A disoriented driver crosses diagonally from one corner of a 150 m by 275 m lawn to the far corner. How far does the wayward driver drive across the lawn? Give an approximate answer to three decimal places.

What formula would I apply to solve this?

Responses

Math word problem - drwls, Monday, October 27, 2008 at 6:19am
A diagonal line between opposite corners of a rectangle (the lawn) forms two right triangles. Apply the Pythagorean theorem to either of those triangles. The diagonal will be the hypotenuse in the formula.

is the answer 308.750 m or did I do something wrong?

2 answers

sqrt[(150)^2 + (275)^2] does not equal 308.75..
It is 313.249 (rounded off to three decimal places, as they requested)
oh okay, I see what I did wrong sorry.

Thank you