A cat walks 3 m north, then 4 m east, then 3 m south. How many metres is it now from where it started?
Hints
Take them one at a time. The first gives nothing away.
1A nudge
Draw it. Three arrows, in order.
2The strategy
Sketch the walk on paper, one arrow per instruction, and mark the start and the finish. The answer is the gap between those two points, not the length of the path.
3The full solution
The 3 m north and the 3 m south cancel, so the cat ends up 4 m east of where it began.
Solution— no shortcut on this one
Draw the three arrows in order. Going 3 m north and later 3 m south cancels out exactly, leaving only the 4 m east. So the cat finishes 4 m from where it started, even though it walked 10 m in total. The transferable idea: distance walked and distance from the start are different questions, and a sketch makes the difference obvious in a way the words do not.
Why this is on the test: Drawing converts a memory task into a looking task, and confusing path length with displacement is what the question is really testing.