How do you find the distance when given two coordinate points?

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Answer 1 · 2014-11-06T16:00:01

Distance Formula

The distance $D$ between two points $(x_1,y_1)$ and $(x_2,y_2)$ can be found by

$D=sqrt{(x_2-x_1)^2+(y_2-y_1)^2}$

Example

Find the distance between the points $(1,-2)$ and $(5,1)$ .

Let $(x_1,y_1)=(1,-2)$ and $(x_2,y_2)=(5,1)$ .

By Distance Formula above,

$D=sqrt{(5-1)^2+[1-(-2)]^2}=sqrt{16+9}=sqrt{25}=5$

I hope that this was helpful.