Month: June 2025

Week 17 in Pre Cal 11 – Special triangles

This week in Pre-Calculus, I feel we went much deeper into trigonometry. We learned a lot of new concepts and one thing in particular I liked was special triangles. Special triangles help you find the angles (rotational and reference) when working with different trig problems.

These are my notes and I’m going to explain them so excuse how messy they are. At the top, you can see two special triangles. Pretty much you can have triangles with 30, 60, and 90 angles or you can have 45, 45, 90. These set of angles can help you determine what kind of triangle you dealing with and help; you figure out your rotational angle and the side lengths on your triangles.

Triangles with angles 30, 60, and 90 will have the side lengths 1, root 3 and 2

Triangles with angles 45, 45, and 90 will have the side lengths 1, 1 and root 2

The reason I like these triangles is because when doing questions with them you automatically know your side lengths just from the angles. It makes questions that seem hard quite simple!!

Week 16 in Pre Cal 11 – Angles and rotation

This week in Pre-Calculus 11, we’ve gone a lot more in-depth about trigonometry. We learned about angle rotation and how it you can find different ratios. One thing I found very interesting was how Sin= Y over R. This ratio is equivalent to Sin= O over H but most of the ratio’s we know from grade ten have changed this year.

What I wanted to talk about was the cast rule and how we can tell which ratio’s will be negative/positive just from looking where they are.

These are some notes I went over with my tutor but I really like the way he explained it. Pretty much we can just consider Sin = Y Cos = X and Tan as Y/X. This makes it a lot easier when we’re thinking about the value of our variables. Sin will always be positive in Q1 and 2 as that is where Y is positive. Cos will be positive in Q1 and 4 as X is positive there and Tan will be positive in Q1 and Q3. This Is also easy to remember using the CAST rule where Q1 is all Q2 is Sin Q3 is Tan and Q4 is cos but I think this way of thinking helps give a bit better understanding to it.

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