Introduction to Further Applications of Trigonometry

class="introduction"

class="key-equations" title="Key Equations"

class="key-concepts" title="Key Concepts"

class="review-exercises" title="Review Exercises"

class="practice-test" title="Practice Test"

class="try"

class="section-exercises"

A picture of the bottom of the world's largest living tree.

The world’s largest tree by volume, named General Sherman, stands 274.9 feet tall and resides in Northern California.¹ Just how do scientists know its true height? A common way to measure the height involves determining the angle of elevation, which is formed by the tree and the ground at a point some distance away from the base of the tree. This method is much more practical than climbing the tree and dropping a very long tape measure.

In this chapter, we will explore applications of trigonometry that will enable us to solve many different kinds of problems, including finding the height of a tree. We extend topics we introduced in Trigonometric Functions and investigate applications more deeply and meaningfully.

Footnotes

1 Source: National Park Service. "The General Sherman Tree." http://www.nps.gov/seki/naturescience/sherman.htm. Accessed April 25, 2014.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

You can also download for free at http://cnx.org/contents/fd53eae1-fa23-47c7-bb1b-972349835c3c@8.1

Attribution:

For questions regarding this license, please contact partners@openstaxcollege.org.
If you use this textbook as a bibliographic reference, then you should cite it as follows: OpenStax College, Precalculus. OpenStax CNX. http://cnx.org/contents/fd53eae1-fa23-47c7-bb1b-972349835c3c@8.1.
If you redistribute this textbook in a print format, then you must include on every physical page the following attribution: "Download for free at http://cnx.org/contents/fd53eae1-fa23-47c7-bb1b-972349835c3c@8.1."
If you redistribute part of this textbook, then you must retain in every digital format page view (including but not limited to EPUB, PDF, and HTML) and on every physical printed page the following attribution: "Download for free at http://cnx.org/contents/fd53eae1-fa23-47c7-bb1b-972349835c3c@8.1."