a supervisor must train a new team of loggers to estimate the height of trees. As an example she walks off 350 ft from the base of a tree and estimates the angle of elevation to the trees peak to be 65 degrees. how tall is the tree?

Question

a supervisor must train a new team of loggers to estimate the height of trees. As an example she walks off 350 ft from the base of a tree and estimates  the angle of elevation to the trees peak to be 65 degrees. how tall is the tree?

anonymous · Answer

We can use the tangent function here. Since tangent is defined as $$\tan(\theta) = {opposite \over adjacent}$$where theta is the angle from the ground to the peak, opposite is the height of the tree, and adjacent is the distance she walks off. Therefore, so solve for opposite, $$opposite = \tan(\theta)*adjacent$$