Geometry / Mr. Hansen 2/14/2004

Name: ____________________________

Trigonometry Practice Problems

	Instructions: The following problems were randomly generated by Smokey and his obsolete siblings. Remember that to earn credit, you must both (a) show your diagram, equation setup, and answer in the manner illustrated below, and (b) type the answer into the computer using the required answer format (3 decimal places and units for lengths, dd°mm¢ format for angles).
1.
	Solution:
	Let x = unknown side. [You must either write this, or clearly mark your variable on the diagram.]
	[Note: The purpose of the three dots (. . .) after the .719 above is to indicate to the reader that the calculator has additional accuracy beyond the digits that have been recorded on paper. If you were to divide 7.7 by the value of cos 44° found in the table on p. 424, namely .7193, you would get 10.705 cm when rounding to 3 decimal places. Smokey would reject this answer, since 7.7 divided by the true cosine of 44 degrees gives (approximately) 10.704259650828, which rounds to 10.704, not 10.705.]
2.
	Solution:
	Let q = unknown Ð. [Either write this, or clearly mark your variable inside the triangle at the appropriate vertex.]
	[Note: Even if your scientific calculator has a feature for converting decimal degrees to degrees/minutes/seconds, you should know the following technique. While your calculator is displaying the approximate value of q, namely 49.8268587811, punch in –49 ENTER to get rid of the integer part. That leaves you with only the decimal part, namely .8268587811. Then multiply that result by 60 to get the minutes, namely 49.61152687…, which rounds to 50. That is why the final answer is 49°50¢.] [Reasonableness check: Notice that on p. 424, the value closest to 1.184 in the tangent column is about 50°, and in fact we would be much closer to 50° than to 49°. That gives us added confidence in the accuracy of our answer.] [Technical note: On the obsolete NEC computers, you can enter the degree symbol by typing SHIFT + GRPH + @. In other words, hold down the SHIFT and GRPH keys while pressing the @ key.]