This  week in math we learned more about trigonometry. We learned about the shortened form of sine cosine and tangent which is SOH CAH TOA. This helps us figure out which formula we are going to use. We also learned how to figure out a given angle as learned to use our scientific calculators.

Here is a example question:

Here we are shown where our angle is and we are given two sides. Our first step is to label our sides so we know which equation we are going to use.

As you can see, I labelled our hypotenuse (65m) our opposite side and our adjacent side (16m). Since we are given two sides we can figure out which equation to use which will be the cosine ratio or “CAH”. The reason we use this ratio is because we are given the A and the H in “CAH”.

In this photo what I did was write out our ratio (CAH) and I wrote our our given sides. After that i plugged those numbers into our equation which is our ratio, angle, then it equals our sides over each other. We have 16 over 65 because in our ratio (CAH), A comes before H so we know that A goes on top of H. (We also know that H will always be on the bottom of our equation based off previous trials).

Our final step was to figure out the answer to our equation. In order to do that we have to isolate our angle. As you can see I move our ratio (cos) to the opposite side and changed its exponent which was 1 to a negative and i added brackets to our fraction. After that everything is simple. We just have to type that equation into our calculator making sure our cosine ratio is in the negative and we get our answer of 75.749… but since our question is asking us to round that long decimal to the tenths we can just leave it as 75.7.

All I did in this picture was write our our final answer making sure to put a tiny dot over our equal sign which indicates that we rounded our decimal.