Hello everyone thanks for watching another video of McMathHelp, today I will be teaching you

how to do basic trigonometry.

Basic trigonometry deals with right angled triangles. This means that one of the corners of the
triangles is at 90 degrees. So it should be perfectly straight up.
The three functions of trigonometry is sine, cosine, and tangent. With these three functions we
may figure out parts of the right triangle that we do not know. It is important to understand the
ratios of the sine cosine and tangent.
But to understand the ratios of sine cosine and tangent we must understand which sides of the
right triangles are which. There are 3 sides to a triangle and the easiest one to remember is the
hypotenuse which is the longest side of the triangle. However the other 2 sides of the triangle
completely depend on the reference corner of the triangle. For example in figure 1., there is a
triangle with every side, corner labelled. If we are using the reference angle ‘a,’ then the
opposite side would be A and the adjacent side is B. However, if the reference angle is ‘b,’ then
the adjacent side would be A and the opposite side would be B. Now that we understand the
sides of the triangle, we may now apply this knowledge to understand the ratios of sine cosine
and tangent.
The ratio of sine is opposite / hypotenuse, the ratio of cosine is adjacent / hypotenuse and the
ratio of tangent is opposite / adjacent. And with the ratios of the functions of trig understood,
we may now answer some questions dealing with finding the angle of a right triangle with 2
sides of the triangle given to us.
Now looking at question 1 we have the sides given to us which is 15 and 8, and the question
wants us to find the angles c and b using the information that was given to us.
A key piece of information to understand in trig is how to use a calculator. When finding the
angle of a triangle, you must use the inverse of the trig ratio. So on the calculator it should look
like tan-1(---). Now to get your calculator to look like this, you must press 2 nd function, or shift
then press the trig ratio you need. This way you get the proper answer and now a very low
answer.
First, to find the angle c we may use the inverse function of tangent by pressing shift then
tangent or 2nd function tangent on other calculators and then entering the function of tangent.
After entering the function of tangent, you then input the ratio of tangent from the reference
angle of c which is opposite / adjacent which is 15/8 in this case. The answer on the calculator
gives us 61.93. Now that we have the angle of c and now, we must find the angle of b to finish
the question. And we use the same function of tangent but instead of 15/8 we input the ratio
8/15 because the point of reference angle has been changed. The answer we get is 28.07. And
you may check this answer by adding all three angles together because the angles of a triangle
all come to make 180 degrees.
Moving on the next question is a question where they are asking for the side B and we must
find it using an angle of the triangle and using a side of the triangle that they are asking us for.
Now using the angle that they give us as the reference angle, the side that the question gives us
is the opposite side, and the B side is the adjacent, so we have tan(28) = 15/x since we are
looking for the adjacent. Now to solve for x we must multiply the x on both sides, then divide
the tan(28) on both sides which gives us the equation x = 15/tan(28) now by inputting this into
the calculator we get the answer 28.2 which means that B is 28.2.
That is all for basic trigonometry!! Thank you for watching McMathHelp and be ready for the
next video on graphing functions!