Solve the all parts of following problem

Problem- Physics questions tend to have a format of, "If the barn is 10m tall and the yard is 20m wide, determine the color of the horses." My main concern with understanding physics is trying to decode what they want me to solve! I recently worked on a question involving the velocity of an air balloon moving due east at velocity x relative to the ground, and an eagle moving due north at velocity y relative to the balloon, and it asked what the eagle's velocity was relative to the ground.

Part 1- How was I to know that it's asking for the resultant vector between the eagle and the balloon.

Part 2- why didn't they just ask for the resultant vector in the first place, instead of having me think that there's some kind of z-axis involvement at hand?

Part 3- Are there any tips or tricks that help decode standard word problems in physics? For example, I do know that when a problem asks about "line of sight", it's usually asking for a hypotenuse of a triangle.

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