Trigonometric Functions used in real life By Abhijeet

Trigonometric Functions used in real life By: Abhijeet Dasmohapatra

What are Trigonometric Functions ? Trigonometric functions is a function of an angle expressed as the ratio of two of the sides of a right triangle that contains that angle; the sine, cosine, tangent, cotangent, secant, or cosecant.

Trigonometric functions are mostly used in different types of mathematics but they are also used in real life. Such as finding the height of the building, construction, physics, and even in marine biology and engineering.

Why did you choose this topic ? I chose this topic because many people believe that trigonometric functions are used only in mathematics, but it’s also used in real life experiences. Even though many people are pursuing different things it’s still used everywhere we go. I wanted to show we use trig functions in our everyday lives like finding out how far a person is from a building or object and how tall it is.

Question From the top of a fire tower, a forest ranger sees his partner on the ground at an angle of depression of 40 °. If the tower is 45 feet in height, how far is the partner from the base of the tower, to the nearest tenth of a foot ?

The Angle Of Depression is The "downwards" angle from the horizontal to a line of sight from the observer to some point of interest. And in order to solve this question not only do we need to know the trig ratios. But we also need to know what trig function to use for this question to find out how far the forest ranger is from the base of the tower.

Since we are given the height which is 45 feet and the angle of depression 40°, we would have to use the tangent ratio which is opposite/adjacent to find out the base. And the base is adjacent so we would need to find out the adjacent.