Igor is flying a kite. He has let out 170 m of kite string. The string makes an angle of 68 degrees with the level ground. To the nearest meter, how high is the kite?

Question

johnweldon1993 · Answer

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with this drawing....use trig....you have an angle....a side that is the hypotenuse....and you want the opposite side...what trig function do you want to use?

anonymous · Answer

i dont know?

johnweldon1993 · Answer

You must have gone over the trigonometric functions if you are asking this type of problem. Sin, Cos, Tan etc...sound familiar?

anonymous · Answer

well my teacher doesn't teach us very well so we have to teach ourselves and im confused but yea i do know what they are.  Could you walk me through the problem

johnweldon1993 · Answer

yeah no problem...and good for you for self-study

Think of this "SOH, CAH, TOA" "so, kah, toe-a"

Sin("insert degree measurement here") (S), the "sine" is equal to the opposite (O) over the hypotenuse (H)
Cos("insert degree measurement here") (C), the "cosine" is equal to the adjacent (A) over the hypotenuse (H)
and
Tan("insert degree measurement here") (T), the "tangent" is equal to the opposite (O) over the adjacent (A)

so with THIS problem...you have...a degree measurement....and a side that is the hypotenuse.....and you want the OPPOSITE side.

so

which function that I have described above....uses the Hypotenuse, and the Opposite?

anonymous · Answer

sine

johnweldon1993 · Answer

exactly....so you would set it up like this

$$\sin (68) = Opposite/170m$$

As you can see, with this equation as it is now....says you are solving for sin(68)...no, you want to solve for Opposite right? so what do you have to do to isolate Opposite?

anonymous · Answer

multiply opposite on both sides?

johnweldon1993 · Answer

no you would multiply both sides by 170 right? that way you ONLY have Opposite on the right side....if you multiply both sides by Opposite...you would have opposite squared on the right....

so

if your multiply Opposite/170    by 170....you get Opposite

if you multiply sin(68) by 170...you get????...

anonymous · Answer

0.64278761

anonymous · Answer

???

johnweldon1993 · Answer

make sure your calculator is in degree mode not radians