Poonam walks 3 km. northwars and then she turns left and moves 2km.?

Question

She again turns left and goes 3 km. and turns to her right and starts walking striaght. In which direction is she walking now?

Answer 1

The difficulty in this question is that the surface of the earth is non-euclidean and the vectors labels north, east, south and west only hold true on euclidean space. We can approximate the Earth's surface to a euclidean surface if the area we are considering is sufficiently small and we are not considering the behaviour near the north pole (remember that you can never walk northwards forever, eventually you are walking south!).

The answer in this simplified case has already been given here (west) but the answer could never* be any different!

Even if we consider Poonam to be 1.5 km from the north pole! If pooname walks 3km she would be facing south. She turns left and walks 2km, then turns left and walks 3km again (again crossing the north pole and ending up facing southwards). Finally, she turns right and is facing (surprise surprise) west.

* if Poonam begins at the south pole, she would end up facing north. If Poonam began 3km south of the north pole she would also end up facing north. These are the only two cases where the answer would be different.

Answer 2

East

Answer 3

west

Answer 4

west

Answer 5

east