Hey guys. Now that I've began my advanced physics subject at melbourne uni, I expect that there will be many questions arising from tutorial sheets and whatnot. So in expectation of the near future, I'm creating this thread with some top notch questions to boot! Your help will be much appreciated.
Q: A wheel of radius 45cm rolls along a horizontal floor. A dot, P, is painted on the rim. Initially P is in contact with the floor. After the wheel has rotated half a revolution, P is at the top of the wheel. What is the displacement (magnitude and direction) of P from its initial position when it is at the top of the wheel?
To answer the question I found out first the x component (how far along the horizontal axis it traveled. To do this I found half the circumference of the wheel. The y component was obviously the diameter (90cm)
The direction of the displacement I got was

and the magnitude was about 1.68 metres. Is this correct? The lecturer always said answer in SI units.. so was it correct of me to answer it in metres and not centimetres?