A ship is anchored off a long straight shoreline that runs North and South. From two observation points 18 miles apart on the shore, the bearing of the ships are N31E and S53E. What is the distance from the ship to each of the observation points?

Question

anonymous · Answer

found this off the internet

let the points be labelled 1 and 2 resp. thus the distance of point 1 from the ship is the hypotenuse of the triangle. Let 1 be a distance x miles from the ship along the bank.
the distance of point 2 will be 18-x miles

since ship is N31degreesE then the ship is 31 degrees North Eastly of point 1 which means the distance of the ship will be x/cos31

while the distance of point 2 will be (18-x)/cos 53 from the ship..

x can be found by relating the 2 cosine descriptions for the distance of the ship from the bank like:

(18-x)tan53=xtan31 where in all angles are in degrees...
it's difficult to represent verbally ...a diagram would be self-explanatory...

anonymous · Answer

medal n fan plz