NAMING

THOSE TRIG RATIOS

You have now familiarized yourself with the ratios of right angle triangles and seen how important and useful
they are. It should then be no surprise that they were given names.

It is important to note that although the names might seem fancy, their meanings are simply the ratio of sides
of a right triangle. And those ratios are important because all similar right triangles have the same ratios!
Now you can pull your calculator! Woohoo! Try calculating sin (42). What did you get? Compare it to the table
of trig ratios from last class.
(a) What precisely does that value mean geometrically?
For any right triangle with an angle of 42 degrees, ___________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________________________.
(b) Check the following on your calculator, see if the table above matches what you get, and explain what the
number means geometrically:
Type tan(81)

Type cos(46)

Type sin(44)

Geometrically, it means:


For any right triangle with an
angle of 81 degrees,

Geometrically, it means:


For any right triangle with an angle
of 46 degrees,

Geometrically, it means:


For any right triangle with an angle
of 44 degrees,

What does all this mean? It means that your calculator has a table of trig ratios stored within it! Arent
calculators so wonderful? Three cheers for calculators!
But do you think the table of trig ratios in your calculator is the exact same as the one that you received last
class? Explain (hint our angles were all integers!).







Excellent! Now use your calculator to help you solve the questions below. Show your work

How about the triangle to the right? Is it possible to use your calculator and the trig
ratios to find the unknown angle? It most definitely is!

Instead of using cosine, were using something called inverse cosine. For now, just
know that what this does is it looks through the calculators internal extensive table of
trig ratios, finds the appropriate one, and outputs the angle. When we use just cosine
we are giving the calculator the angle and asking it to retrieve the ratio of the adjacent
side and the hypotenuse. When we use inverse cosine we are giving the calculator
the ratio of the sides and asking it to retrieve the angle.

Enter this on your calculator:

, and hit Enter. To get inverse cosine, press

. You should get the missing angle!

We could do the same with inverse sine and inverse tangent.

Try these ones!













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(d) For the following two problems, write down three different things you could type on your calculator to give
you the missing angle: