Lindsey is fishing from a small boat her fishing hook is 12 m below her, and a fish is swimming at the same depth as the hook, 16 m away. how far is lindsey from the fish

Lindsey is 20 m away from the fish.

Step-by-step explanation:

To solve this, I first drew it out. Lindsey is in a boat and her hook is a vertical line below her. Label this line 12m since the hook is 12 m below her.

Next, go from the hook and draw a horizontal line to the fish. Label this line 16m since that's how far the fish is from the hook.

Now, create a dashed  diagonal line from Lindsey to the fish, this is the distance we want to find.

Notice that we've created a triangle and that the dashed line is the hypotenuse. A hypotenuse is the side of a triangle that is opposite to a 90 degree angle in a right triangle. To find the length of a hypotenuse we can use the Pythagorean theorem.

a and b are the lengths of the two sides of the triangle that are not the hypotenuse, so:

the length of the dashed line between Lindsey and the fish is 20m, so Lindsey is 20m away from the fish.

step-by-step explanation:

you can add the two numbers and divide the result by 2. or you can find the gap between the two numbers and add half of this to the smaller number.