# Distance and Direction

• November 24th 2011, 11:57 AM
joshuafalls
Distance and Direction
Hi

I am stuck with a sheet I got from school and i dont understand what the question means. Ive attached a picture of the street/houses and hope one of you guys could figure out the answer to the last 2 questions

1. Find a Rule for the numbers of two houses if one house is due south of the other house

2. Find a rule for the numbers of two houses if one house is due north-west of the other house.

Any Ideas ?

Help Needed

Thanks
• November 24th 2011, 12:37 PM
corsica
Re: Maths Help Needed - Distance and Direction
Step 1: determine which information is relevant for the subquestion (and which information is not). Houses 13 through 18 are not directly south of any other house, so you can ignore these houses for the first subqestion, we're only interested here in houses 1 through 12.

Step 2: identify the variables. For the first subquestion there are two variables: the number of a northern house and the number of its opposing southern house. Let's call the number of a northern house $x_N$, and the number of its opposing southern house $x_S$

Step 3: make a formula that links the the two house numbers. In this case a simple linear formula will do:
$x_n=a+bx_s$
I'll leave it up to you to figure out the values for constants $a$ and $b$

Then repeat the same steps for the second subquestion.