Video Transcript
How many horizontal lines are in
this polygon?
There are some interesting words in
this question. Do you remember what the word
polygon means? A polygon is just a 2D shape that’s
made out of straight sides. So, our question could’ve just used
the word shape. And we know the name of this 2D
shape, don’t we? It’s a rectangle. So, what we’re being asked is, how
many horizontal lines are there in this rectangle?
And you can probably see how many
lines there are that make up a rectangle. A rectangle has four straight
sides, doesn’t it? But our question doesn’t just ask
us how many lines there are. It asks us how many horizontal
lines there are. Do you remember what the word
horizontal means?
To help us remember, we could think
of a word that’s part of the word horizontal. And that’s the word horizon. Do you know what the horizon
is? It’s the line we see in the
distance where the sky meets either the sea or the land. And although you’d see it wasn’t
perfectly straight, if you got up close, it certainly looks straight from a
distance. It looks perfectly level from left
to right without sloping up or down at all. And remembering the word horizon
can help us remember what the word horizontal means. Just like the horizon, it’s a line
that’s perfectly straight from left to right and doesn’t slant or slope in either
direction.
So, which lines of this polygon are
horizontal? Well, this top line or side is
horizontal, isn’t it? And there’s also a horizontal line
opposite it on the bottom. But if we look at the two lines
that make up the sides of our rectangle, we can see that they are straight. And they’re not sloped or slanted
in any way. But instead of running from left to
right, they run from top to bottom. These aren’t horizontal lines. They’re vertical lines. And so, we can say the number of
horizontal lines that there are in this polygon is two.
