Math, Even in Rio

Our tutors go to crazy lengths to help their students understand math concepts.  When Top Honors closed for the holidays for a couple weeks, one of them went hang gliding.  We can’t think of a better way to conceptualize negative numbers.

If a tutor goes hang gliding and takes off from a cliff that is 246 m high, what integer could describe the direction of his descent back to land?  

Answer: -246

For those of you with your thinking hats on, yes, this situation has Pythagorean Theorem written all over it (the length of the hand glider’s trajectory and the horizontal distance from the base of the cliff to the landing point).