Jessica is standing 20 feet away from a skyscraper in New York when she measures the angle of elevation to the top of the building as 88.8°. To the nearest foot, how tall is the building?

Question

anonymous · Answer

We have an adjacent side in the triangle which is 20 ft. We have an angle and we need the opposite side of the triangle. We have to work with tangent since we are looking for opposite and we have adjacent.
$$tan(88.8) = \frac{opposite}{20}$$
$$20tan(88.8)=opposite=954.79\approx955ft$$