2 sides of a right-angled triangle are 5cm and 6cm. Calculate the length of the hypotenuse.

You need to use Pythagoras's theorem which states that for any right angled triangle, a²+b²=c² , where c is the hypotenuse and a and b are the other 2 sides of the triangle. Therefore, in this case a and b are 5cm and 6cm , so using Pythagoras, you can plug these numbers into the equation to calculate c (which is our hypotenuse): 5²+6² = c² . This means that 61 = c² , so to work out the length of c, you must do the inverse of squaring , which is the square root of 61 = 7.81cm (2 dp) --> that is the length of the hypotenuse.