how can special right riangles help me find side lenths?
The special triangles maintain their side ratio's no matter how they scale. For instance, one special right triangle is the 3,4,5 triangle. It is names so because any right triangle with sides of 3 and 4 will have a hypotenuse of 5: |dw:1354050078243:dw|
you can verify with pythagorean. IF you see a triangle with sides 6 and 8, well, that's just a 3,4,5 triangle scaled by 2 so the hyp will end up being scaled by 2 as well (10)
other special triangles may include the 30/60 right triangle, wherein the angles are 30, 60 and 90. |dw:1354050223445:dw| in this case no matter the size of the sides the ratio of the hyp to the side opposite the 30 degrees is exactly 2. Or the sin of 30 is 0.5. Or the cos of 60 is 0.5 again if you see these angles these ratios will hold true no matter the size
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